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MEMOIRS 



BY 

CHARLES GODFREY LELAND 

(HANS BREITMANN) 




NEW YORK 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

1893 



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Copyright, 1893, 
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 



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Electrotyped and Printed 

AT THE APPLETON PrESS, U. S. A. 



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i I ii I ( 



PREFACE. 



It happened once in Boston, in the year 1861 or 1862, 
that I was at a dinner of the Atlantic Club, such as was held 
every Saturday, when the question was raised as to whether 
any man had ever written a complete and candid autobiog- 
raphy. Emerson, who was seated by me at the right, sug- 
gested the "Confessions" of Rousseau. I objected that it 
was full of untruths, and that for plain candour it was sur- 
passed by the " Life of Casanova." Of this work (regarding 
which Carlyle has said, " Whosoever has looked therein, let 
him wash his hands and be unclean until even ") neither 
Emerson nor Lowell, nor Palfrey nor Agassiz, nor any of the 
others present seemed to have any knowledge, until Dr. 
Holmes, who was more adventurous, admitted he knew some- 
what thereof. Now, as I had read it thrice through, I knew 
it pretty well. I reflected on this, but came to the conclusion 
that perhaps the great reason why the world has so few and 
frank autobiographies is really because the world exacts too 
much. It is no more necessary to describe everything cynic- 
ally than it is to set forth all our petty diseases in detail. 
There are many influences which, independent of passion or 
shame, do far more to form character. 

Acting from this reflection, I wrote this book with no in- 
tention that it should be published ; I had, indeed, some idea 
that a certain friend might use it after my death as a source 
whence to form a Life. Therefore I wrote, as fully and 
honestly as I could, everything which I could remember 



{y PREFACE. 

which had made me what I am. It occurred to me as a 
leading motive that a century or two hence the true inner 
life of any man who had actually lived from the time when 
railroads, steamboats, telegraphs, gas, percussion-caps, ful- 
minating matches, the opera and omnibuses, evolution and 
socialism were quite unknown to his world, into the modern 
age, would be of some value. So I described my childhood 
or youth exactly as I recalled, or as I felt it. Such a book 
requires very merciful allowance from humane reviewers. 

It seemed to me, also, that though I have not lived famil- 
iarly among the princes, potentates, and powers of the earth, 
yet as I have met or see7i or corresponded with about five 
hundred of the three thousand set down in " Men of the 
Time," and been kindly classed among them, it was worth 
while to mention my meetings with many of them. Had 
the humblest scribbler of the age of Elizabeth so much as 
mentioned that he had ever exchanged a word with, or even 
looked at, any of the great writers of his time, his record 
would now be read with avidity. I have really never in my 
life run after such men, or sought to make their acquaintance 
with a view of extending my list; all that I can tell of them, 
as my book will show, has been the result of chance. But 
what I have written will be of some interest, I think — at least 
" in the dim and remote future." 

I had laid the manuscript by, till I had time to quite for- 
get what I had written, when I unexpectedly received a pro- 
posal to write my memoirs. I then read over my work, and 
determined " to let it go," as it was. It seemed to me that, 
with all its faults, it fulfilled the requisition of Montaigne in 
being 2i7ig livre cle honne foye. So it has gone forth into 
print. Jacta est alea. 

The story of what is to me by far the most interesting 
period of my life remains to be written. This embraces an 
account of my labour for many years in introducing Indus- 
trial Art as a branch of education in schools, my life in Eng- 
land and on the Continent for more than twenty years, my 



PREFACE. y 

travels in Russia and Egypt, my researches among Gypsies 
and Algonkin Indians, my part in Oriental and Folklore and 
other Congresses, my discovery of the Shelta or Ogham tongue 
in Great Britain, and the long and very strangely adven- 
turous discoveries, continued for .five years, among witches in 
Italy, which resulted in the discovery that all the names of 
the old Etruscan gods are still remembered by the peasantry 
of the Toscana Romagna, and that ceremonies and invoca- 
tions are still addressed to them. All this, however, is still 
too near to be written about. But it may perhaps some day 
form a second series of reminiscences if the present volumes 
meet with public favour. 

As some of my readers (and assuredly a great many of the 
American) will find these volumes wanting in personal ad- 
venture and lively variety of experiences, and perhaps dull 
as regards " incidents," I would remind them that it is, after 
all, only the life of a mere literary man and quiet, humble 
scholar, and that such existences are seldom very dramatic. 
English readers, who are more familiar with such men or 
literature, will be less exacting. What I have narrated is 
nowhere heightened in colour, retouched in drawing, or made 
the utmost of for effect, and I might have gone much further 
as regards my experiences in politics with the Continental 
Magazine^ and during my connection with Colonel Forney, 
or life in the West, and have taken the whole, not more from 
my memory than from the testimony of others. But if this 
work be, as Germans say, at first too subjective, and devoted 
too much to mere mental development by aid of books, the 
" balance " to come of my life will be found to differ mate- 
rially from it, though it is indeed nowhere in any passage ex- 
citing. This present work treats of my infancy in Phila- 
delphia, with some note of the quaint and beautiful old 
Quaker city as it then was, and many of its inhabitants who 
still remembered Colonial times and Washington's Republican 
Court ; reminiscences of boyhood in New England ; my revo- 
lutionary grandfathers and other relatives, and such men as 



vi PREFACE. 

the last survivor of the Boston Tea-party (I also saw the last 
signer of the Declaration of Independence) ; an account of 
my early reading ; my college life at Princeton ; three years 
in Europe passed at the Universities of Heidelberg, Munich, 
and Paris, in what was emphatically the prime of their quaint 
student-days ; an account of my barricade experiences of the 
French Revolution of Forty-Eight, of which I missed no 
chief scene ; my subsequent life in America as lawyer, man 
of letters, and journalist ; my experiences in connection with 
the Civil War, and my work in the advancement of the sign- 
ing the Emancipation by Abraham Lincoln ; recollections of 
tlie Oil Region when the oil mania was at its height ; a win- 
ter on the frontier in the debatable land (which was indeed 
not devoid of strange life, though I say it) ; my subsequent 
connection for three years with Colonel John Forney, during 
which Grant's election was certainly carried by him, and in 
which, as he declared, I " had been his right-hand man ; " 
my writing of sundry books, such as the " Breitmann Bal- 
lads," and my subsequent life in Europe to the year 1870. 

I can enumerate in my memory distinctly half-a-dozen 
little-known men whom I have known, and could with time 
recall far many more, compared to whose lives my uneventful 
and calm career has been as that of the mole before the 
eagle's. Yet not one of their lives will ever be written, 
which is certainly a pity. The practice of writing real auto- 
biographies is rapidly ceasing in this our age, when it is bad 
form to be egoistic or to talk about one's self, and we are 
almost shocked in revising those chronicled in the Causeries 
de Lundi of Sainte-Beuve. Nowadays we have good gossipy 
reminiscences of other people, in which the writer remains as 
unseen as the operator of a Punch exhibition in his schwassel 
box, while he displays his puppets. I find no fault with this 
— a chaciin sa manure. But it is very natural under such 
influences that men whose own lives are full of and inspired 
with their oioii deeds will not write them on the model of 
Benvenuto Cellini. One of the greatest generals of modern 



PREFACE. yii 

times, Lord Napier of Magdala, told me that he believed I 
was the only person to whom he had ever fully narrated his 
experiences of the siege of Lucknow. He seemed to be sur- 
prised at having so forgotten himself. In ancient Viking 
days the hero made his debut in every society with a " Me 
void, mes enfants ! Listen if you want to be astonished ! " 
and proceeded to tell how he had smashed the heads of kings, 
and mashed the hearts of maidens, and done great deeds all 
round. It was bad form — and yet we should never have 
known much about Eegner Lodbrog but for such a canticle. 
If I, in this work, have not quite effaced myself, as good taste 
demands, let it be remembered that if I had, at the time of 
writing, distinctly felt that it would be printed as put down, 
there would, most certainly, have been much less of " me " 
visible, and the dead-levelled work would have escaped much 
possible shot of censure. It was a little in a spirit of defiant 
reaction that I resolved to let it be published as it is, and 
risk the chances. As Uncle Toby declared that, after all, a 
mother must in some kind of a way be a relation to her own 
child, so it still appears to me that to write an autobiography 
the author must say something about himself ; but it is a 
great and very popular tour de force to quite avoid doing this, 
and all art of late years has run to merely skilfully overcom- 
ing difficulties and avoiding interesting motives or subjects. 
It may be, therefore, that in days to come, my book will be 
regarded with some interest, as a curious relic of a barbarous 
age, and written in a style long passed away — 

" When they sat with ghosts on a stormy shore, 
And spoke in a tongue which men speak no more ; 
Living in wild and wondrous ways, 
In the ancient giant and goblin days." 

Once in my younger time, one of the most beautiful and 
intellectual women whom I ever knew, Madame Anita de 
Barrera — (Daniel Webster said she was beautiful enough to 
redeem a whole generation of blue-stockings from the charge 
of ugliness) — once made a great and p'athetic fuss to me about 



viii PREFACE. 

a grey hair which had appeared among her black tresses. 
" And what difference," I said, " can one white hair make to 
any friend ? " " Well," she replied, " I thought if I could 
not awaken any other feeling, I might at least inspire in you 
veneration for old age." So with this work of mine, if it 
please in naught else, it may still gratify some who love to 
trace the footsteps of the past, and listen to what is told by 
one who lived long " before the war." 

Now for a last word — which involves the only point of 
any importance to me personally in this preface — I would 
say that there will be certain readers who will perhaps think 
that I have exaggerated my life-work, or blown my own 
trumpet too loudly. To these I declare in plain honesty, that 
I believe there have been or are in the United States tliou- 
sands of men who have far surpassed me, especially as re- 
gards services to the country during the Civil War. There 
were leaders in war and diplomacy, editors and soldiers who 
sacrificed their lives, to whose names I can only bow in rev- 
erence and humility. But as it was said of the great unknown 
who passed away — the fortes ante Againemnoji — " they had 
no poet, and they died." These most deserving ones have 
not written their lives or set themselves forth, " and so thev 
pass into oblivion " — and I regret it with all my soul. But 
this is no reason why those who did something, albeit in 
lesser degree, should not chronicle their experiences exactly 
as they appear to them, and it is not in human nature to 
require a man to depreciate that to which he honestly devoted 
all his energies. Perhaps it never yet entered into the heart 
of man to conceive how much has really been done by every- 
body. 

And I do most earnestly and solemnly protest, as if it 
were my last word in life, that I have said nothing whatever 
as regards my political work and its results which was not 
seriously said at the time by many far greater men than I, so 
that I believe I have not the least exaggerated in any trifle, 
even unconsciously. Thus I can never forget the deep and 



PREFACE. ix 

touching sympathy which Henry W. Longfellow expressed 
to me regarding my efforts to advance Emancipation, and 
how, when some one present observed that perhaps I would 
irritate the Non-Abolition Union men, the poet declared em- 
phatically, " But it is a great idea " or " a noble work." And 
Lowell, Emerson, and George W. Curtis, Bayard Taylor, and 
many more, spoke to the same effect. And what they said 
of me I may repeat for the sake of History and of Truth. 

The present work describes more than forty years of life 
in America, and it is therefore the American reader who will 
be chiefly interested in it. I should perhaps have mentioned 
what I reserved for special comment in the future : that dur- 
ing more than ten years' residence in Europe I had one thing 
steadily in view all the time, at which I worked hard, which 
was to qualify myself to return to America and there intro- 
duce to the public schools of Philadelphia the Industrial or 
Minor Arts as a branch of education, in which I eventually 
succeeded, devoting to the work there four years, applying 
myself so assiduously as to neglect both society and amuse- 
ments, and not obtaining, nor seeking for, pay or profit thereby 
in any way, directly or indirectly. And if I have, as I have 
read, since then " expatriated" myself, my whole absence has 
not been much longer than was that of Washington Irving, 
and I trust to be able to prove that I have " left my country 
for my country's good " — albeit in a somewhat better sense 
than that which was implied by the poet. 

And I may here incidentally mention, with all due mod- 
esty, that since the foregoing paragraph came to me " in re- 
vise," I received from Count Angelo di Gubernatis a letter, 
beginning with the remark that, in consequence of my gentile 
ed insistente preimWa, or " amiable persistence, begun four 
years ago," he has at length carried out my idea and sugges- 
tion of establishing a great Italian Folklore Society, of 
which I am to rank as among the first twelve members. 
This is the fourth institution of the kind which I have been 
first, or among the first, to found in Europe, and it has in 



X PREFACE. 

every case been noted, not without surprise, that I was an 
American. Such associations, being wide-reaching and cos- 
mopolitan, may be indeed considered by every man of oulture 
as patriotic, and I hope at some future day that I shall still 
further prove that, as regards my native country, I have only 
changed my sky but not my heart, and laboured for American 
interests as earnestly as ever. 

Charles Godfrey Leland. 
Bagni di Lucca, Italy, August 20, 1893. 



CONTENTS. 



PAoa 
I.— Early Life (1824-1837) 1 

II.— Boyhood and Youth (1837-1845) . . . . .65 

III. — University Life and Travel in Europe (1845-1848) . 107 

IV.— The Return to America (1848-1882) ... . .190 

V. — Life during the Civil War and its Sequence (1862- 

1866) 245 

VI.— Life on the Press (1866-1869) 318 

VII.— Europe Revisited (1869-1870) 370 

VIII.— England (1870) 387 



I. 

EARLY LIFE. 

1824-1837. 

My birthplace — Count Bruno and Dufief — Family items — General 
Lafayette — The Dutch witch-nurse — Early friends and associations 
— Philadelphia sixty years ago — Early reading — Genealogy — First 
schools — Summers in New England — English influences — The 
Revolutionary grandfather — Centenarians — The last survivor of 
the Boston Tea-party and the last signer of the Declaration — 
Indians — Memories of relations — A Quaker school — My ups and 
downs in classes — Arithmetic — My first ride in a railway car — 
My marvellous invention — Mr. Alcott's school — A Transcendental 
teacher — Rev. W. H. Furness — Miss Eliza Leslie — The boarding- 
school near Boston — Books — A terrible winter — My first poem — I 
return to Philadelphia. 

I WAS born on the 15th of August, 1824, in a house 
which was in Philadelphia, and in Chestnut Street, the 
second door below Third Street, on the north side. It had 
been built in the old Colonial time, and in the room in 
Avhich I first saw life there was an old chimney-piece, which 
was so remarkable that strangers visiting the city often came 
to see it. It was, I believe, of old carved oak, possibly me- 
diaeval, which had been brought from some English manor 
as a relic. I am indebted for this information to a Mr. 
Landreth, who lived in the house at the time.* 

* As I was very desirous of learning more about this celebrated fire- 
place, I inserted a request in the Public Ledger for information regard- 
ing it, which elicited the following from some one to me unknown, to 
whom I now return thanks : — 

" Mr. City-Editor of the Public Ledger, — In your edition of this 
date, I notice a communication headed ' To Local Antiquarians.' With- 



2 MEMOIRS. 

It was then a boarding-house, kept by a Mrs. Rodgers. 
She had taken it from a lady who had also kept it for board- 
ers. The daughter of this latter married President Madison. 
She was the well-known " Dolly Madison," famous for her 
grace, accomplishments, and helle humeur, of whom there are 
stories still current in Washington. 

My authority informed me that there were among the 
boarders in the house two remarkable men, one of whom 
often petted me as a babe, and took a fancy to me. He was 
a Swedish Count, who had passed, it was said, a very wild 
life as pirate for several years on the Spanish Main. He 
was identified as the Count Bruno of Frederica Bremer's 
novel, " The Neighbours." The other was the famous phi- 
lologist, Dufief, author of " Nature Displayed," a work of 
such remarkable ability that I wonder that it should have 
passed into oblivion. 

My mother had been from her earliest years devoted to 
literature to a degree which was unusual at that time in the 
United States. She had been, as a girl, a special protegee of 
Hannah Adams, the author of many learned works, who was 
the first person buried in the Mount Auburn Cemetery of 
Boston. She directed my mother's reading, and had great 

out any well-founded pretensions to the designation * Antiquarian,' as I 
get older I still take a great interest in the early history of our beloved 
city. I remember distinctly the fact, but not the date, of reading a de- 
scription of the ' mantelpiece.' It was of wood, handsomely carved on 
the pillars, and under the shelf, and on the centre between the pillars, 
was the following quaint and witty hieroglypJiic inscription : — 

When the grate is M. T. put : 
When it is . putting : 

which is a little puzzling at first sight, but readily translated by con- 
verting the punctuation points into written words. Senior. 
"Frankford, May S4, ISOSr 

I can add to this, that the chimney-piece was originally made for 
wood-fires, and that long after a grate was set in and the inscription 
added. 



EARLY LIFE. 3 

influence over her. My mother had also been very intimate 
with the daughters of Jonathan Russell, the well-known 
diplomatist. My maternal grandfather was Colonel God- 
frey, who had fought in the war of the Revolution, and who 
was at one time an aide-de-camp of the Governor of Massa- 
chusetts. He was noted for the remarkable gentleness of 
his character. I have heard that when he went forth of a 
morning, all the animals on his farm would run to meet and 
accompany him. He had to a miraculous degree a certain 
sympathetic power, so that all beings, men included, loved 
him. I have heard my mother say that as a girl she had a 
tame crow who was named Tom, and that he could distinctly 
cry the word " What ? " "When Tom was walking about in 
the garden, if called, he would reply " What ? " in a per- 
fectly human manner. 

W^hen I was one month old. General Lafayette visited our 
city and passed in a grand procession before the house. It is 
one of the legends of my infancy that my nurse said, " Char- 
ley shall see the General too ! " and held me up to the win- 
dow. General Lafayette, seeing this, laughed and bowed to 
me. He was the first gentleman who ever saluted me for- 
mally. When I reflect how in later life adventure, the study 
of languages, and a French Revolution came into my experi- 
ences, it seems to me as if Count Bruno, Dufief, and Lafa- 
yjette had all been premonitors of the future. 

I was a great sufferer from many forms of ill-health in 
my infancy. Before my second birthday, I had a terrible ill- 
ness with inflammation of the brain. Dr. Dewees (author of 
a well-known work on diseases of women and children), who 
attended me, said that I was insane for a week, and that it 
was a case without parallel. I mention this because I believe 
that I owe to it in a degree whatever nervousness and tend- 
ency to " idealism " or romance and poetry has subsequently 
been developed in me. Through all my childhood and youth 
its influence was terribly felt, nor have I to this day recov- 
ered from it. 



4 MEMOIRS. 

I should mention that my first nurse in life was an old 
Dutch woman named Van der Poel. I had not been born 
many days before I and my cradle were missing. There was 
a prompt outcry and search, and both were soon found in the 
garret or loft of the house. There I lay sleeping, on my 
breast an open Bible, with, I believe, a key and knife, at my 
head lighted candles, money, and a plate of salt. Nurse Van 
der Poel explained that it was done to secure my rising in 
life — by taking me up to the garret. I have since learned 
from a witch that the same is still done in exactly the same 
manner in Italy, and in Asia. She who does it must be, 
however, a strega or sorceress (my nurse was reputed to be 
one), and the child thus initiated will become deep in dark- 
some lore, an adept in occulta^ and a scholar. If I have not 
turned out to be all of this in majorihus^ it was not the fault 
of my nurse. 

Next door to us lived a family in which were four daugh- 
ters who grew up to be famous belles. It is said that when 
the poet N. P. Willis visited them, one of these young ladies, 
who was familiar with his works, was so overcome that she 
fainted. Forty years after Willis distinctly recalled the cir- 
cumstance. Fainting was then fashionable. 

Among the household friends of our family I can remem- 
ber Mr. John Vaughan, who had legends of Priestley, Berke- 
ley, and Thomas Moore, and who often dined with us on 
Sunday. I can also recall his personal reminiscences of Gen- 
eral Washington, Jefferson, and all the great men of the pre- 
vious generation. He was a gentle and beautiful old man, 
with very courtly manners and snow-white hair, which he 
wore in a queue. He gave away the whole of a large fortune 
to the poor. Also an old Mr. Crozier, who had been in 
France through all the French Eevolution, and had known 
Kobespierre, Marat, Fouquier Tinville, &c. I wish that I 
had betimes noted down all the anecdotes I ever heard from 
them. There were also two old ladies, own nieces of Benja- 
min Franklin, who for many years continually took tea with 



EARLY LIFE. 5 

us. One of them, Mrs. Kinsman, presented me with the cot- 
ton quilt under which her uncle had died. Another lady, 
Miss Louisa Nancrede, who had been educated in France, 
had seen Napoleon, and often described him to me. She told 
me many old French fairy-tales, and often sang a ballad 
(which I found in after years in the works of Cazotte), 
which made a great impression on me — something like that 
of " Childe Eoland to the dark tower came." It was called 
Le Sieur Enguerrand^ and the refrain was " Oh ma tonne fax 
tant ])eurP 

That these and many other influences of culture stirred 
me strangely even as a child, is evident from the fact that 
they have remained so vividly impressed on my memory. 
This reminds me that I can distinctly remember that when I 
was eight years of age, in 1832, my grandmother, Mrs. Oliver 
Leland, told my mother that the great German poet Goethe 
had recently died, and that they bade me remember it. On 
the same day I read in the AtlienoBum (an American reprint 
of leading articles, poems, &c., from English magazines, 
which grandmother took all her life long) a translation of 
Schiller's " Diver." I read it only once, and to this day I 
can repeat nearly the whole of it. I have now by me, as I 
write, a silver messenger-ring of King Eobert, and I never 
see it without thinking of the corner of the room by the side- 
door where I stood when grandmother spoke of the death of 
Goethe. But I anticipate. 

My father was a commission merchant, and had his place 
of business in Market Street below Third Street. His part- 
ner was Charles S. Boker, who had a son, George, who will 
often be mentioned in these Memoirs. George became in 
after life distinguished as a poet, and was Minister for many 
years at Constantinople and at St. Petersburg. 

From Mrs. Eodgers' my parents went to Mrs. Shinn's, 
in Second Street. It also was a very old-fashioned house, 
with a garden full of flowers, and a front doorstep almost on 
a level with the ground. The parlour had a large old fire- 



e MEMOIRS. 

place, set with blue tiles of the time of Queen Anne, and it 
was my delight to study and have explained to me from them 
the story of Joseph and his brethren and ^sop's fables. 
Everything connected with this house recurs to me as emi- 
nently pleasant, old-fashioned, and very respectable. I can 
remember something very English-like among the gentle- 
men-boarders who sat after dinner over their Madeira, and 
a beautiful lady, Mrs. Stanley, who gave me a sea-shell. 
Thinking of it all, I seem to have lived in a legend by Haw- 
thorne. 

There was another change to a Mrs. Eaton's boarding- 
house in Fifth Street, opposite to the side of the Franklin 
Library. I can remember that there was a very good marine 
picture by Birch in the drawing-room. This was after living 
in the Washington Square house, of which I shall speak 
anon. I am not clear as to these removals. There were 
some men of culture at Mrs. Eaton's — among them Sears C. 
Walker, a great astronomer, and a Dr. Brewer, who had trav- 
elled in Italy and brought back with him pieces of sculpture. 
We were almost directly opposite the State House, where 
liberty had been declared, while to the side, across the street, 
was the Library founded by Dr. Franklin, with his statue 
over the door. One of his nieces often told me that this was 
an absolutely perfect likeness. The old iron railing, now re- 
moved — more's the pity ! — surrounded the Square, which was 
full of grand trees. 

It was believed that the spirit of Dr. Franklin haunted 
the Library, reading the books. Once a coloured woman, 
who, in darkey fashion, was scrubbing the floor after mid- 
night, beheld the form. She was so frightened that she 
fainted. But stranger still, when the books were removed to 
the New Library in Locust Street, the ghost went with them, 
and there it still " spooks " about as of yore to this day, as 
every negro in the quarter knows. 

In regard to Franklin and his apparition, there was a 
schoolboy joke to this effect : that ivhenever the statue of 



EARLY LIFE. 7 

Franklin over tlie Library door heard the clock strike twelve 
at night, it descended, went to the old Jefferson Wigwam, 
and drank a glass of beer. But the sell lay in this, that a 
statue cannot hear. 

And there was a dim old legend of a colony of Finns, 
who, in the Swedish time, had a village all to themselves in 
Wiccacoe. They were men of darksome lore and magic 
skill, and their women were witches, who at tide and time 
sailed forth merrily on brooms to the far-away highlands of 
the Hudson, where they held high revel with their Yankee, 
Dutch, and Indian colleagues of the mystic spell. David 
MacEitchie, in a recent work, has made a note of this curious 
offshoot of the old Philadelphia Swedes. 

And I can also remember that before a marble yard in 
Eace Street there were two large statues of very grim for- 
bidding-looking dogs, of whom it was said that when there 
was any one about to die in the quarter, these uncanny 
hounds came down during a nightly storm and howled a 
death duet. 

And when I was very young there still lingered in the 
minds of those invaluable living chronicles (whether bound 
in sheepskin or in calf), the oldest inhabitants, memories 
from before the Eevolution of the Indian market, when on 
every Saturday the natives came from their rural retreats, 
bringing pelts or skins, baskets, moccasins, mocos or birch 
boxes of maple-sugar, feathers, and game for sale. Then 
they ranged themselves all along the west side of Independ- 
ence Square, in tents or at tables, and sold— or were sold 
themselves— in bargains. Even now the Sunday-child, or he 
who is gifted to behold the departed, may see the ghostly 
forms of Eed-men carrying on that weekly goblin market. 
Miss Eliza Leslie's memory was full of these old stories, 
which she had collected from old people. 

As for the black witches, as there were still four negro 
sorcerers in Philadelphia in 1883 (I have their addresses), it 
may be imagined to what an extent Voodoo still prevailed 



8 MEMOIRS. 

among our Ebo-ny men and brothers. Of one of these my 
mother had a sad experience. We had a black cook named 
Ann Lloyd, of whom, to express it mildly, one must say that 
she was " no good." My mother dismissed her, but several 
who succeeded her left abruptly. Then it was found that 
Ann, who professed to be a witch, had put a spell of death on 
all who should take her place. My mother learned this, and 
when the last black cook gave warning she received a good 
admonition as to a Christian being a slave to the evil one. 
I believe that this ended the enchantment. There is or was 
in South Fifth Street an African church, over the door 
of which was the charming inscription, " Those who have 
walked in Darkness have seen a great light." But this light 
has not even yet penetrated to the darksome depths of Lom- 
bard or South Streets, if I may believe the strange tales which 
I have heard, even of late, of superstition there. 

Philadelphia was a very beautiful old-fashioned city in 
those days, with a marked character. Every house had its 
garden, in which vines twined over arbours, and the magnolia, 
honeysuckle, and rose spread rich perfume of summer nights, 
and where the humming-bird rested, and scarlet tanager or 
oriole with the yellow and blue bird flitted in sunshine or in 
shade. Then swallows darted at noon over the broad streets, 
and the mighty sturgeon was so abundant in the Delaware 
that one could hardly remain a minute on the wharf in 
early morn or ruddy evening without seeing some six-foot 
monster dart high in air, falling on his side with a plash. 
In the winter-time the river was allowed to freeze over, and 
then every schoolboy walked across to Camden and back, as 
if it had been a pilgrimage or religious duty, while meantime 
there was always a kind of Eussian carnival on the ice, oxen 
being sometimes roasted whole, and all kinds of " fakirs," as 
they are now termed, selling doughnuts, spruce-beer, and 
gingerbread, or tempting the adventurous with thimblerig ; 
many pedestrians stopping at the old-fashioned inn on 
Smith's Island for hot punch. Juleps and cobblers, and the 



EARLY LIFE. 9 

" one thousand and one American fancy drinks," were not as 
yet invented, and men drank themselves unto the devil quite 
as easily on rum or brandy straight, peach and honey, madeira 
and punch, as they now do on more varied temptations. 
Lager beer was not as yet in the land. I remember drink- 
ing it in after years in New Street, where a German known as 
der diche Georg first dealt it in 1848 to our American public. 
Maize- whisky could then be bought for fifteen cents a gal- 
lon ; even good " old rye " was not much dearer ; and the 
best Havanna cigars until 1840 cost only three cents a-piece. 
As they rose in price they depreciated in quality, and it is 
now many years since I have met with a really aromatic old- 
fashioned Havanna. 

It was a very well-shaded, peaceful city, not " a great vil- 
lage," as it was called by New Yorkers, but like a pleasant 
English town of earlier times, in which a certain picturesque 
rural beauty still lingered. The grand old double houses, 
with high flights of steps, built by the Colonial aristocracy — 
such as the Bird mansion in Chestnut Street by Ninth Street 
— had a marked and pleasing character, as had many of the 
quaint black and red-brick houses, whose fronts reminded 
one of the chequer-board map of our city. All of this quiet 
charm departed from them after they were surrounded by a 
newer and noisier life. I well remember one of these fine 
old Colonial houses. It had been the old Penington mansion, 
but belonged in my early boyhood to Mr. Jones, who was one 
of my father's partners in business. It stood at the corner of 
Fourth and Race Streets, and was surrounded on all sides by 
a garden. There was a legend to the effect that a beautiful 
lady, who had long before inhabited the house, had been so 
fond of this garden, that after death her spirit was often seen 
of summer nights tending or watering the flowers. She was 
a gentle ghost, and the story made a great impression on me. 
I still possess a pictured tile from a chimney-piece of this old 
mansion. 

The house is gone, but it is endeared to me by a very 



10 MEMOIRS. 

strange memoiy. When I was six or seven years of age, I 
had read Shakespeare's " Tempest," and duly reflected on it. 
The works of Shakespeare were very rare indeed in Quaker 
Philadelphia in those days, and much tabooed, but Mr. Jones, 
who had a good library in the great hall upstairs, possessed a 
set in large folio. This I was allowed to read, but not to re- 
move from the place. Hov/ well I can remember passing my 
Saturday afternoons reading those mighty tomes, standing 
first on one leg, then on the other for very weariness, yet ab- 
sorbed and fascinated ! 

About this time I was taken fo the theatre to see Fannie 
Kemble in " Much Ado About Nothing " — or it may have 
been to a play before that time — when my father said to me 
that he supposed I had never heard of Shakespeare. To 
which I replied by repeating all the songs in the " Tempest." 
One of these, referring to the loves of certain sailors, is not 
very decent, but I had not the remotest conception of its im- 
propriety, and so proceeded to repeat it. A saint of virtue 
must have laughed at such a declamation. 

As it recurs to me, the spirit which was over Philadelphia 
in my boyhood, houses, gardens, peoi^le, and their life, was 
strangely quiet, sunny, and quaint, a dream of olden time 
drawn into modern days. The Quaker predominated, and 
his memories were mostly in the past ; ours, as I have often 
said, was a city of great trees, which seemed to me to be ever 
repeating their old poetic legends to the v/ind of Swedes, 
witches, and Indians. 

Among the street- cries and sounds, the first which I 
can remember was the postman's horn, when I was hardly 
three years old. Then there were the watchmen, " who 
cried the hour and weather all night long." Also a col- 
oured man who shouted, in a strange, musical strain which 
could be heard a mile : 

" Tra-la-la-la-la-la-loo. 
Le-mon-ice-cream ! 
An'-wanilla-too ! " 



EARLY LIFE. n 

Also tlie quaint old Hominy-man : 

" De Hominy man is on his way, 
Frum de Navy- Yard ! 
Wid his harmony ! " 

(Spoken) " Law bess de putty eyes ob de young lady ! Hominy's 
good fur de young ladies ! 

" De Harmony man is on his way," &c. 

Also, " Hot-corn ! " " Pepper-pot ! " " Be-an-ti-ful Clams I " 
with the " Sweep-oh " cry, and charcoal and muffin bells. 

One of the family legends was, that being asked by some 
lady, for whom I had very little liking, to come and visit her, 
I replied with great politeness, but also with marked firm- 
ness, " I am very much obliged to you, ma'am, and thank you 
— but I luonHy 

In Washington Square, three doors from us, at the corner 
of Walnut Street, lived Dr. George McClellan. He had two 
sons, one, John, of my own age, the other, George, who was 
three years younger. Both went to school with me in later 
years. George became a soldier, and finally rose to the head 
of the army in the first year of the War of Kebellion, or 
Emancipation, as I prefer to term it. 

Washington Square, opposite our house, had been in the 
olden time a Potter's Pield, where all the victims of the yel- 
low fever pestilence had been interred. Now it had become 
a beautiful little park, but there were legends of a myriad of 
white confused forms seen flitting over it in the night, for it 
was a mysterious haunted place to many still, and I can re- 
member my mother gently reproving one of our pretty neigh- 
bours for repeating such tales. 

I have dreamy yet very oft-recurring memories of my life 
in childhood, as, for instance, that just before I was quite 
three years old I had given to me a copy of the old N"ew Eng- 
land Primer, which I could not then read, yet learned from 
others the rhymes with the quaint little cuts. 

" In Adam's fall 
We sin-ned all." 



12 MEMOIRS. 

" My book and heart 
Shall never part," &c. 

Also of a gingerbread toy, with much sugar, colour, and 
gilding, and of lying in a crib and having the measles. I can 
remember that I understood the meaning of the word dead 
before that of alive^ because I told my nurse that I had heard 
that Dr. Dewees was dead. But she replying that he was 
not, but alive, I repeated " live " as one not knowing what it 
meant. 

I recollect, also, that one day, when poring over the pic- 
tures in a toy-book, my Uncle Amos calling me a good little 
boy for so industriously reading, I felt guilty and ashamed 
because I could not read, and did not like to admit it. 
"Whatever my faults or follies may be, I certainly had an 
innate rectitude, a strong sense of honesty, just as many 
children have the contrary ; and this, I believe, is due to in- 
herited qualities, though these in turn are greatly modified 
by early association and influences. That I also had preco- 
cious talent and taste for the romantic, poetic, marvellous, 
quaint, supernatural, and humorous, was soon manifested. 
Even as an infant objects of hric-d-hrac and of antiquity 
awoke in me an interest allied to passion or awe, for which 
there was no parallel among others of my age. Tiiis was, I 
believe, the old spirit which had come down through the 
ages into my blood — the sjoirit which inspired Leland the 
Flos Grmnmaticorum^ and after him John Leland, the anti- 
quary of King Henry VIII., and Chrs. (Charles) Leland, 
who was secretary of the Society of Antiquaries in the time 
of Charles I. Let me hereby inform those who think that 
" Chrs." means Christopher, that there has been a Charles in 
the family since time immemorial, alternated with an Oliver 
since the days of Cromwell. 

John Leyland, an Englishman, now living, who is a deep 
and sagacious scholar, and the author of the " Antiquities of 
the Town of Halifax" (a very clever work), declares that for 
four hund7'ed yeai'S there has not been a generation in which 



EARLY LIFE. 13 

some Leland (or Leyland.) of the old Bussli de Leland stock 
has not written a work on antiquity or allied to antiquarian- 
ism, though in one case it is a translation of Demosthenes, 
and in another a work on Deistical Writers. He traces the 
connection with his own family of the Henry Leland, my 
ancestor, a rather prominent political Puritan character in 
his time, who first went to America in 1636, and acquired 
land which my grandfather still owned. It was very exten- 
sive. 

There is a De la Laund in the roll of Battle Abbey,* but 
John says our progenitor was De Bussli^ who came over with 
the Conqueror, ravaged all Yorkshire, killing 100,000 men, 
and who also burned up, perhaps alive, the 1,000 Jews in the 
Tower of York. For these eminent services to the state he 
was rewarded with the manor of Leyland, from which he 
took his name. The very first complete genealogical register 
of any American family ever published Avas that of the Leland 
family, by Judge Leland, of Roxbury, Mass. (but for which 
he was really chiefly indebted to another of the name), in 
which it is shown that Henry Leland had had in 1847 fifteen 
thousand descendants in America. In regard to which I am 

* Also given as Delaund or Dellaund in one copy. De Qiiincey was 
proud of his descent from De la Laund. I may here say that John 
Leyland, who is a painstaking and conscientious antiquarian and accom- 
plished genealogist, has been much impressed with the extraordinary 
similarity of disposition, tastes, and pursuits which has characterised 
the Lelands for centuries. Any stranger knowing us would think that 
he and [ were nearly related. It is told of the manor of Leyland that 
during the early Middle Ages it was attempted to build a church there 
in a certain place, but every morning the stones were found to be re- 
moved. Finally, it was completed, but the next dawn beheld the whole 
edifice removed to the other spot, while a spirit-voice was heard to call 
(one account says that the words were found on a mystic scroll) : 

" iere s^all iit bee, 
ginb |cre sl^all ilt statibe; 
^nb 1^3 sl^all bee talleb: 
§e Cfem^e of f eglanb." 



14 MEMOIRS. 

honoured with a membership in the Massachusetts Genealog- 
ical Society. The crest of Bussli and the rest of us is a raven 
or crow transfixed by an arrow, with a motto which I dearly 
love. It is Ctd debeo, fidtcs. Very apropos of this crow or 
raven is the following : Heinrich Heine, in his " Germany " 
(vol. ii. p. 211, Heinemann's edition), compares the same to 
priests " whose pious croaking is so well known to our ears." 
This is in reference to such birds which fly about the moun- 
tain of Kyffhauser, in which the Emperor Friedrich Barba- 
rossa is sleeping, and where he will sleep till they disappear. 
And then, praising himself, Heine adds : " But old age has 
weakened them, and there are good marksmen who know 
right well how to bring them down. I know one of these 
archers, who now lives in Paris, and who knows how, even 
from that distance, to hit the crows which fly about the 
Kyflhauser. When the Emperor returns to earth, he will 
surely find on his way more than one raven slain by this 
archer's arrows. And the old hero will say, smiling, * That 
man carried a good bow.' " In my note to this I remarked 
that " the raven or crow transfixed by an arrow is the crest 
of the coat-of-arms of the name of Leland, or of my own. I 
sincerely trust that Bussli, the first who bore it, did not 
acquire the right to do so by shooting a clergyman." As a 
single crow is an omen of ill-luck, so the same transfixed sig- 
nifies misfortune overcome, or the forcible ending of evil in- 
fluences by a strong will. It is a common belief or saying 
among all the Lelands, however widely related, that there has 
never been a convicted criminal of the name. Dii faxint ! 

At four years of age, while still living in Washington 
Square, I was sent to an infant school in Walnut Street, 
above Eighth Street, south side, near by. It was kept by the 
Misses Donaldson. We all sat in a row, on steps, as in an 
amphitheatre, but in straight lines. Miss Donaldson, senior, 
sat at a desk, prim and perpendicular, holding a " rod which 
was fifteen or twenty feet in length, with which she could 
hit on the head or poke any noisy or drowsy child, without 



EARLY LIFE. 15 

stirring from her post. It was an ingenious invention, and 
one which might be employed to advantage in small churches. 
I can remember that at this time I could not hear a tune 
played without stringing my thoughts to it ; not that I have 
any special ear for music, but because I am moved by melody. 
There was a rhyme that was often sung to me to the tune of 
" Over the Water "— 

" Charley Buff 

Had money enough, 
And locked it in his store ; 

Charley die 

And shut his eye, 
And never saw money no more." 

The influence of this and other tunes on my thought was 
so great, that I have often wondered whether anybody ever 
realised how much we may owe to metre acting on thought ; 
for I do not believe that I ever penned any poetry in my life 
unless it was to a tu7ie ; and even in this prose which I now 
write there is ever and anon a cadence as of a brook running 
along, then rising, anon falling, perceptible to me though 
not to you, yet which has many a time been noted down by 
critics speaking gently of my work. This induced me to 
learn betimes an incredible number of songs ; in fact, at the 
age of ten or eleven I had most of Percy's " Eelics " by heart. 
This naturally enough led me to read, and reading under- 
stand, an amount of poetry of such varied character that I 
speak with strictest truth in saying that I have never met 
with, and never even read of, any boy who, as a mere little 
boy, had mastered such a number and variety of ballads and 
minor poems as I had done — as will appear in the course of 
this narrative. 

While living at Mrs. Eaton's I was sent to a school kept 
by two very nice rather young Quaker ladies in Walnut 
Street. It was just opposite a very quaint old-fashioned col- 
lection of many little dwellings in one (modelled after the 
Fuggerei of Augsburg?) known as the Quaker Almshouse. 



16 MEMOIRS. 

One morning I played truant, and became so fearfully weary 
and bored lounging about, that I longed for the society of 
school, and never stayed from study any more. Here I was 
learning to read, and I can remember " The History of Little 
Jack," and discussing with a comrade the question as to 
whether the word history really meant his story, or was in- 
geniously double and inclusive. I also about this time be- 
came familiar with many minor works, such as are all now 
sold at high prices as chap-books, such as " Marmaduke 
Multiply," " The World Turned Upside Down," " Chronon- 
hotonthologos," " The Noble History of the Giants," and 
others of Mr. Newberry's gilt-cover toy-books. All of our 
juvenile literature in those days was without exception Lon- 
don made, and very few persons can now realise how deeply 
Anglicised I was, and how all this reading produced associa- 
tions and feelings which made dwelling in England in later 
years seem like a return to a half-forgotten home, of which 
we have, however, pleasant fairy-tale reminiscences. 

The mistress of the school was named Sarah Lewis, and 
while there, something of a very extraordinary nature — to 
me, at least — took place. One day, while at my little desk, 
there came into my head with a strange and unaccountable 
intensity this thought : " I am I — I am Myself— I myself /," 
and so on. By forcing this thought on myself very rapidly, 
I produced a something like suspension of thought or syn- 
cope ; not a vertigo, but that mental condition which is allied 
to it. I have several times read of men who recorded nearly 
the same thing among their youthful experiences, but I do 
not recall that any of them induced this coma by reflecting 
on the ego-ism of the I, or the me-ness of the Me.* It often 
recurred to me in after years when studying Schelling and 



* A similar incident is recorded in Kenelm Chillmgly, I had long 
before the publication of the work conversed with Lord Lytton on the 
subject— which is also touched on in my Sketch-Book of Meister Karl, 
of which the illustrious author had a copy. 



EARLY LIFE. 17 

Fichte, or reading works by Mystics, Quietists, and tlie like. 
At a very early age I was indeed very much given to in- 
dulging in states of mind resembling metaphysical abstrac- 
tion — a kind of vague marvelling what I ivas and what others 
were ; whether they and everything were not spirits playing 
me tricks, or a delusion — a kind of psychology without ma- 
terial or thought, like a workman without tools. 

For a short time, while five or six years old, and living at 
Mrs. Eaton's, I was sent to a school of boys of all ages, kept 
by a man named Eastburn, in Library Street, whom I can 
only recall as a coarse, brutal fiend. From morning to night 
there was not a minute in which some boy was not screaming 
under the heavy rattan which he or his brother always held. 
I myself — infant as I was — for not learning a spelling-lesson 
properly, was subjected to a caning which would have been 
cruel if inflicted on a convict or sailor. In the lower story 
this man's sister kept a girls' school, and the ruffian was con- 
tinually being called down-stairs to beat the larger girls. My 
mother knew nothing of all this, and I was ashamed to tell 
that I had been whipped. I have all my life been opposed 
to corporal punishment, be it in schools or for criminals. It 
brings out of boys all that is evil in their nature and nothing 
that is good, developing bullying and cruelty, while it is 
eminently productive of cowardice, lying, and meanness — as 
I have frequently found when I came to hear the private life 
of those who defend it as creating " manliness." It was 
found during the American war that the soldiers who had 
been most accustomed to beating and to being beaten were 
by far the greatest cowards, and that " Billy Wilson's " regi- 
ment of pugilists was so absolutely worthless as to be un- 
qualified for the field at any time. One thing is very certain, 
that I have found that boys who attend schools where there 
is no whipping, and little or no fighting, are freest from that 
coarseness which is so invariably allied to meanness, lying, 
and dishonesty. I had about 2000 children in the ^j^^Z'/ic 
schools of Philadelphia pass under my teaching, and never 



18 MEMOIRS. 

met with but one instance of direct rudeness. There was 
also only one of dishonesty or theft, and that was by a fight- 
ing boy, who looked like a miniature pugilist. Philadelphia 
manners were formed by Quakers. When I visited, in 1884, 
certain minor art- work classes established in the East End of 
London, Mr. Walter Besant said to me that I would find a 
less gentle set of pupils. In fact, in the first school which I 
examined, the girls had, the week before, knocked down, 
kicked, and trampled on an elderly lady who had come to 
teach them art-work out of pure benevolence. I am often 
told that whipping put an end to garroting. If this be true, 
which it is not (for garroting was a merely temporary fancy, 
which died out in America without whipping), it only proves 
that the garotters, who were all fighting and boxing roughs, 
were mere cowards. Red Indians never whip children, but 
they will die under torture without a groan. 

My parents were from Massachusetts, and every summer 
they returned to pass several months in or near Boston, gen- 
erally with their relatives in Worcester county, in Dedham, 
in the " Hub " itself, or in Milford, Mendon, or Holliston, 
the home of my paternal grandfather, Oliver Leland. Thus 
I grew to be familiar with New England, its beautiful scenery 
and old-fashioned Yankee rural ways. Travelling was then 
by stage-coach, and it took two days to go from Philadelphia 
to Boston, stopping on the way overnight at Princeton, Perth 
Amboy, or Providence. This is to me a very interesting 
source of reminiscences. In Dedham, for three summers, I 
attended school. I remember that we stayed with Dr. Jeremy 
Stimson, who had married a sister of my mother. I studied 
French ; and can recall that my cousins Caroline and Emily, 
who were very beautiful young ladies, generally corrected my 
exercises. I was then seven or eight years of age. Also that 
I was very much alone ; that I had a favourite bow, made by 
some old Indian ; that I read with great relish " Gil Bias " 
and " Don Quixote," and especially books of curiosities and 
oddities which had a great influence on me. I wandered 



EARLY LIFE. I9 

for days by myself fishing, strolling in beautiful wild places 
among rocks and fields, or in forests by the River Charles. I 
can remember how one Sunday during service I sat in church 
unseen behind the organ, and read Benvenuto Cellini's ac- 
count of the sorcerer in the Colosseum in Rome : I shall see 
his Perseus ten minutes hence in the Signoria of Florence, 
where I now write. 

Then there were the quiet summer evenings in the draw- 
ing-room, where my cousins played the piano and sang " The 
Sunset Tree," " Alknoomuk," " I see them on the winding 
way," and Moore's melodies. Tmnpi passati — " 'Tis sixty 
years since." Caroline meantime married a Mr. Wight, who 
had passed most of his life in England, and was thoroughly 
Anglicised. There was also an English lady visiting America 
who stayed a while in Dedham to be with my cousin. She 
was jeicne encore^ but had with her a young English gen- 
tleman relative who loould call her " Mamma ! " which we 
thought rather niais. From my reading and my few ex- 
periences I, however, acquired a far greater insight into life 
than most boys would have done, for I remembered and 
thought long over everything I heard or learned. Between 
my mother and cousins and our visitors there was much read- 
ing and discussion of literary topics, and I listened to more 
than any one noted, and profited by it. 

I was always reading and mentally reviewing. If my 
mother made a call, I was at once absorbed in the first book 
which came to hand. Thus I can remember that one sum- 
mer, when we came to Dr. Stimson's, during the brief inter- 
val of our being shown into the " parlour," I seized on a Uni- 
tarian literary magazine and read the story of Osapho, the 
Egyptian who trained parrots to cry, " Osapho is a god ! " 
Also an article on Chinese acupuncture with needles to cure 
rheumatism; which chance readings and reminiscences I 
could multiply ad infinitum. 

My cousin Caroline, whom I remember as very beautiful 
and refined, with a disti7iguee manner, had a small work- 



20 MEMOIRS. 

box, on the cover of which was a picture of the Pavilion in 
Brighton. She spoke of the building as a rubbishy piece 
of architecture ; but I, who felt it through the " Arabian 
Nights," admired it, and pitied her want of taste. Now I 
have lived altogether three years in Brighton, but I never 
saw the Pavilion without recalling the little yellow work- 
box. In some mysterious way the picture seems to me to be 
grander than the original. Dickens has expressed this idea. 
I was too grave and earnest as a child to be called a cheer- 
ful or happy one, which was partly due to much ill-health ; 
yet, by a strange contradiction not uncommon in America, I 
was gifted with a precociously keen sense of humour, and 
not only read, but collected and preserved every comic alma- 
nac and scrap of droll anecdote which I could get. Thus 
there came into my possession half-a-dozen books of the 
broadest London humour of the time, all of which entered 
into my soul ; such things as : — 

" Ladies in furs and gemmen in spurs, 
Who lollop and lounge all day ; 
The Bazaar in Soho is completely the go, 
Walk into the shop of Grimaldi." 

Reader mine, you can have no conception how deeply T, 
as a mere little boy, entered into and knew London life and 
society from such songs, sketches, anecdotes, books, and cari- 
catures as I met with. Others read and forget them, but I 
took such trifles deep into my soul and choelt on them. It is 
only of late years, since I have lived in England, that I have 
learned how extensively — I may say incredibly well — I was 
informed for my age as to many phases of English life. Few 
of us know what may be got out of reading the current light 
literature of the day, if we only read it earnestly and get it 
by heart. This I did to a great extent, as my reminiscences 
continually awakened in England prove. 

There was in Dedham a very old house of somewhat supe- 
rior style, which had been built, if not in 1630, at least within 
a very few years after. It was inhabited by three sisters 



EARLY LIFE. 



21 



named Fairbanks, who were very peculiar indeed, and their 
peculiarity consisted in a strange devotion to the past, and 
above all to old English memories of colonial times before 
the Eevolution. Even in England this resistance can hardly 
be understood at the present day, and yet it may still be found 
alive in ^NTew England. In the house itself was a well, dug to 
supply water when besieged by Indians, and the old ladies 
used to exhibit an immense old gun once used by Puritans 
and an ox-saddle and other relics. They had also a very 
ancient book of prayer of the Church of England, and an 
old Bible, and thereby hangs a tale. They were all still 
living in 1849 or 1850, when I visited them with my very 
pretty cousin Mary Elizabeth Fisher, and as I professed the 
Episcopal faith, and had been in England, the precious relics 
were shown to me as to one of the initiated. But they showed 
a marked aversion to letting Miss Fisher see them, as she was 
a Unitarian. So they went on, as many others did in my 
youth, still staunch adherents to England, nice old Tories, 
believers in the King or Queen, for whom they prayed, and 
not in the President. I remember that Miss Eliza Leslie 
told me in later years of just such another trio. 

My grandfather in Holliston was, as his father and broth- 
ers and uncles had all been, an old Revolutionary soldier, 
who had been four years in the war and taken part in many 
battles. He had been at Princeton (where I afterwards 
graduated) and Saratoga, and witnessed the surrender of 
Burgoyne to Gates. I was principally concerned to know 
whether the conqueror had Tcept the sivord handed to him on 
this occasion, and was rather disappointed to learn that it 
was given back. Once I found in the garret a bayonet which 
my grandma said had been carried by grandfather in the 
war. I turned it with a broom-handle into a lance and made 
ferocious charges on the cat and hens. 

This grandfather, Oliver Leland, exerted an extraordinary 
influence on me, and one hard to describe. He was great, 
grim, and taciturn to behold, yet with a good heart, and not 



22 MEMOIRS. 

devoid of humour. He was gouty, and yet not irritable. He 
continually recurs to me while reading Icelandic sagas, and 
as a kind of man who would now be quite out of the age any- 
where. All his early associations had been of war and a 
half- wild life. He was born about 1758, and therefore in a 
rude age in rural New England. He, I may say, deeply in- 
terested me. 

All boys are naturally full of the romance of war ; the 
Kevolution was to us more than the Crusades and all chivalry 
combined, and my grandfather was a living example and 
chronicle of all that I most admired. Often I sat on a little 
cricket at his feet, and listened to tales of battles, scoutings, 
and starving ; how he had been obliged to live on raw wheat, 
which produced evil results, and beheld General Washington 
and other great men, and had narrow escapes from Indians, 
and been at the capturing of a fort by moonlight, and seen 
thousands of pounds' worth of stores destroyed. I frequently 
thought of old grandfather Oliver when " out " myself during 
the Civil War, and was half-starved and chilled when scout- 
ing, or when doing rough and tough in West Virginia. 

My grandfather often told me such stories of the war, 
and others of his father and grandfather, who had fought 
before him in the old French war in Canada, and how the 
latter, having gone up to trade among the Indians one win- 
ter, endeared himself so much to them that they would not 
let him go, and kept him a captive until the next summer. 
I came across traces of this ancestor in an old Canadian rec- 
ord, wherein it appears that he once officiated as interpreter 
in the French and Indian tongues. Whereby critics may re- 
mark that learning French and Algonkin runs in our blood, 
and that my proclivity for Indians is legitimately inherited. 
I would that I knew all the folklore that my great-grandsire 
heard in the Indian wigwams in those old days ! 

I can remember seeing my grandfather once sitting and 
talking with five other veterans of the war. But I saw them 
daily in those times, and once several hundreds, or it may be 



EARLY LIFE. 23 

thousands, of them in a great procession in Philadelphia in 
1832. And here I may mention that in 1834 I often saw one 
named Eice, whose age, as authenticated by his pension pa- 
pers, was 106, and that in 1835 I shook hands with Thomas 
Hughes, aged 95, who was the last survivor of the Boston 
Tea party. He had come to visit our school, and how we 
boys cheered the old gentleman, who was in our eyes one of 
the greatest men alive ! But all the old folk in my boyhood 
could tell tales of the Eevolution, which was indeed not very 
much older then than the Eebellion is to us now. 

I can also recollect seeing Charles Carroll of CarroUton, 
the last of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, 
though my memory of the man is now confused with that of 
a very perfect portrait which belonged to his granddaughter, 
Mrs. Jackson, who was a next-door but one neighbour in after 
years in Walnut Street, Philadelphia. He was a very vener- 
able-looking man. 

My father served for a short time in the war of 1812, and 
I have heard him relate that when the startling news of peace 
arrived in Boston, where he was, he at once took a sleigh and 
fast horses and drove full speed, being the first to disseminate 
the news in the country. That was as good as Browning's 
" Eide to Ghent " in its way — apropos of which Mr. Brown- 
ing once startled me by telling me, " I suppose you know that 
it is an invention of mine, and not founded on any real inci- 
dent." But my father's headlong sleigh-ride — he was young 
and wild in those days — was real and romantic enough in all 
conscience. It set bells to ringing, multitudes to cheering, 
bonfires a-blazing on hills and in towns, and also some few to 
groaning, as happened to a certain old deacon, who had in- 
vested his all in English goods, and said, when he heard the 
cheers caused by the news, " Wife, if that's war news, I'm 
saved ; but if it's peace, I'm ruined ! " Even so it befell me, 
in after years, to be the first person to announce in the United 
States, far in advance of any others, the news of the French 
Eevolution of 1848, as I shall fully prove in the sequence. 



24: MEMOIRS. 

It may be here remarked, that, though not " profession- 
als," all of our family, without a break in the record, have 
successively taken turns at fighting, and earned our pay as 
soldiers, since time lost in oblivion ; for I and my brother 
tried it on during the Eebellion, wherein he indeed, standing 
by my side, got the wound from a shell of which he event- 
ually died ; while there were none who were not in the old 
Indian wars or the English troubles of Charles the Second 
and First, and so on back, I dare say, to the days of Bussli 
de Leland, who laid all Yorkshire waste. 

My grandfather, though not wealthy, owned a great deal 
of land, and I can remember that he one afternoon showed 
me a road, saying that he owned the land on each side for a 
mile. I myself, in after years, however, came to own in- fee- 
simple a square mile of extremely rich land in Kansas, which 
I sold for sixteen hundred dollars, while my grandfather's 
was rather of that kind by which men's poverty was measured 
in Virginia — that is to say, the more land a man had the 
poorer he was considered to be. It is related of one of these 
that he once held great rejoicing at having got rid of a vast 
property by the ingenious process of giving some person one 
half of it to induce him to take the other. However, as there 
is now a large town or small city on my grandfather's whi- 
lom estate, I wish that it could have been kept. Mais ou 
sont les neiges d'antan^ or the ducats of Panurge ? 

There was a "home-pasture," a great field behind my 
grandfather's house, where I loved to sit alone, and which 
has left a deep impression on my memory, as though it were 
a fairy-haunted or imagined place. It was very rocky, the 
stones being covered with clean, crisp, dry lichens, and in one 
spot there was the gurgling deep down in some crevice of a 
mysterious unseen spring or rivulet. Young as I was, I had 
met with a line which bore on it — 

*' Deep from their vaults the Loxian murmurs flow." 
And there was something very voice-like or human in this 



EARLY LIFE. 25 

murmur or chattering of the unseen brook. This I dis- 
tinctly remember, that the place gave me not only a feeling, 
but a faith that it was haunted by something gentle and 
merry. I went there many a time for company, being much 
alone. An Indian would have told me that it was the Un a 
games-suk — the spirit-fairies of the rock and stream. These 
beings enter far more largely, deeply, and socially into their 
life or faith than elves or fairies ever did into those of the 
Aryan races, and I might well have been their protege, for 
there could have been few little boys living, so fond as I was 
of sitting all alone by rock and river, hill and greenwood 
tree. There are yet in existence on some of this land which 
was once ours certain mysterious walls or relics of heavy 
stone-work, which my friend Eben C. Horsford thinks were 
made by the Norsemen. I hope that they were, for I have 
read many a saga in Icelandic, old Swedish, and Latin, and 
the romance thereof is deep in my soul ; and as my own 
name is Godfrey, it is no wonder that the god Frey and his 
Freya are dear to me. In my boyhood — and it may be still 
the case — the " Injuns " got the credit of having built these 
mysterious works. 

Not far from Holliston is Mendon, where I had an uncle, 
Seth Davenport, who had a large, pleasant, old-fashioned 
New England farm, which was more productive than my 
grandfather's, since there were employed on it sixteen men, 
three of whom were Natick Indians of the old local stock. 
There were many of them when my mother was young, but I 
suppose that the last of the tribe has long since died. One 
of these Indians, Rufus Pease, I can recall as looking like a 
dark-ruddy gypsy, with a pleasant smile. He very was fond 
of me. He belonged to a well-known family, and had a 
brother — and thereby hangs a tale, or, in this case, a scalp- 
lock. 

" Marm " Pease, the mother of Rufus, had on one occa- 
sion been confined, and old Doctor — I forget his name — who 
officiated at the birth, had been asked to give the infant a 



26 MEMOIRS. 

name. Now he was a dry wag, of the kind so dear to Dr. 
Holmes, and expressed much gratification and gratitude at 
such a cgmpliment being paid to him. " He had long been 
desirous," he said, " of naming a child after his dear old 
friend. Dr. Green." So the name was bestowed, the simple 
Indians not realising for some time after the christening that 
their youngest bore the name of Green Pease. Whether he 
was ever called a duck, I know not. 

Everything about Uncle Seth and Aunt Betsy was, as I 
remember, delightfully comfortable, old-fashioned, and in a 
way beautiful. There was their daughter Eebecca, who was 
pretty and gentle, so that several wild birds came every morn- 
ing to feed from her hand and perch on her fingers. Uncle 
Seth himself wore a scarlet waistcoat, and, as I recall him, 
seemed altogether in figure to belong to the time of Crom- 
well, or to earlier days. There was a hall, hung round with 
many old family portraits in antique dresses, and an immense 
dairy — the pride of Aunt Betsy's heart — and a garden, in 
which I was once shown a humming-bird's nest ; and cousin 
Eebecca's mantelpiece, over a vast old fireplace, heaped with 
mosses, birds' nests, shells, and such curiosities as a young 
girl would gather in the woods and fields ; and the cider- 
press, in which Uncle Seth ground up the sixteen hundred 
bushels of apples which he had at one crop, and the new 
cider gushing in a stream, whereof I had a taste. It was a 
charming, quiet old homestead, in which books and culture 
were not wanting, and it has all to me now something of 
the chiaroscuro and Eembrandt colour and charm of the 
Mdhrclien or fairy-tale. The reality of this charm is apt 
to go out of life as that of literature or culture comes in. 
To this day I draw the deepest impression or sentiment 
of the pantlieism or subtle spiritual charm of Nature far 
more from these early experiences of rural life than from 
all the books, poetry included, which I have ever perused. 
Note this well, ye whose best feelings are only a rechauffe 
of Euskin and Browning — secundem ordinem — for I observe 



EARLY LIFE. 27 

that those who do not think at second hand are growing 
rare. 

In the town of Milford lived my uncle, William Godfrey, 
with my aunt Nancy, and of them and their home I have 
many pleasant memories. The very first of them all was not 
so pleasant to me at the time. My parents had just arrived, 
and had not been ten minutes in the house ere a tremendous 
squall was heard, and my mother, looking from the window, 
beheld me standing in the open barn-door holding a tiny 
chicken in my right hand, while an old hen sat on my head 
flapping her wings and pecking me in wrath. I, seeing the 
brood, had forthwith captured one, and for that was under- 
going penance. It was a beautiful tableau, which was never 
forgotten! We went there on visits for many summers. 
Uncle William was a kind-hearted, "sportive" man, who 
took BelVs Life^ and I can remember that there was a good 
supply of English reading in the house. My uncle had three 
sons, all much older than I. The eldest, Stearns, was said to 
have first popularised the phrase " posted up," to signify well- 
informed. The second, Benjamin, became in after years a 
great manufacturer and somewhat noted politician, and owner 
of a famous racehorse. The third, Samuel, went into busi- 
ness in Philadelphia, and crossed the Atlantic with me. He 
died quite young. All of them, like their father and grand- 
father, were very good-natured or gentle, and men of perfect 
integrity. The Lelands, however, were rather dour and grim 
in their honesty, or more Northern than the Godfreys. This 
was accounted for by the fact, that while my father's family 
was Puritan of the purest, and only intermarried with Puri- 
tan stock, the Godfreys had in Ehode Island received an in- 
fusion of French Huguenot blood, which was indeed very 
perceptible in their faces and lively pleasant manner. 

There was a strange tradition, to which my mother some- 
times jestingly referred, that there had been among her 
Ehode Island ancestors a High German {i. e., not a Hol- 
lander) doctor, who had a reputation as a sorcerer or wizard. 



28 MEMOIRS. 

He was a man of learning, but that is all I ever heard about 
him. My mother's opinion was that this was a very strong 
case of atavism, and that the mysterious ancestor had through 
the ages cropped out again in me. Something tells me that 
this was the High German doctor who, according to Wash- 
ington Irving, laid the mystic spell on Sleepy Hollow, which 
made of it such a pleasant, ancient, dreamy fairy-land. 
Whether his friendly spirit still watches over me, or whether 
I am the man himself, is a problem which I leave to my 
friend Francis Galton, who indeed personally often reminds 
me of Irving. High German sorcerers were not common in 
' those days north of Pennsylvania, so that I trow mine was 
the very man referred to by Geoffrey Crayon. And it is true 
beyond all doubt that even in infancy, as I have often heard, 
there was a quaint uncanniness, as of something unknown, 
in my nature, and that I differed in the main totally from 
every relative, and indeed from any other little boy, known 
to anybody ; though I was a perfect Godfrey in face when 
very young, as I am now a typical Leland. I was always 
given to loneliness in gardens and woods when I could get 
into them, and to hearing words in birds' songs and running 
or falling water ; and I once appalled a visitor by professing 
seriously that I could determine for him some question as to 
what would happen to him by divination with a bullet in an 
Indian moccasin. We had two servants who spoke old Irish ; 
one was an inexhaustible mine of legends, which she related 
to me — she surpassed Croker; the other, less versed, still 
knew a great deal, and told me how her own father, Jackey 
Mooney, had seen the fairies with his own eyes. Both of 
these sincerely and seriously regarded me as "gifted" or 
elfin-favoured, and the latter said in proof thereof, " Only lis- 
ten to his voice ; sure whin he spakes he'd while a burred aff 
a tree." For my uncanny ways made a deep impression on 
them, as also on the darkies. 

Once I had a wonderful dream. I thought that I was in 
Dr. Furness's chapel, but that, instead of the gentle reverend 



EAKLY LIFE. 29 

clergyman, the devil himself was in the pulpit preaching. 
Feeling myself inspired, I went up into the pulpit, threw the 
Evil One out, and preached myself in his place. Now our 
nurse had a dream-book, and made some pretence to mystic 
fairy knowledge learned in Kilkenny, and she interpreted 
this dream as signifying that I would greatly rise in this 
world, and do strange things. But she was greatly struck 
with such a vision in such an infant. 

Now, I was a great reader of Scripture ; in fact, I learned 
a great deal too much of it, believing now that for babes and 
sucklings about one-third of it had better be expurgated. 
The Apocrypha was a favourite work, but above all I loved 
the Eevelations, a vrork which, I may say by the way, is 
still a treasure to be investigated as regards the marvellous 
mixture of Neo-Platonic, later Egyptian (or Gnostic), and 
even Indian Buddhistic ideas therein. Well, I had learned 
from it a word which St. John applies (to my mind very 
vulgarly and much too frequently) to the Scarlet Lady of 
Babylon or Eome. What this word meant I did not know, 
but this I understood, that it was " sass " of some kind, as 
negroes term it, and so one day I applied it experimentally 
to my nurse. Though the word was not correctly pro- 
nounced, for I had never heard it from anybody, its success 
was immediate, but not agreeable. The passionate Irish 
woman flew into a great rage and declared that she would 
"lave the house." My mother, called in, investigated the 
circumstances, and found that I really had no idea whatever 
of the meaning of what I had said. Peace was restored, but 
Annie declared that only the divil or the fairies could have 
inspired such an infant to use such language. 

I was very fond of asking my nurse to sing in old Irish or 
to teach me Irish words. This she did, but agreed with her 
sister Biddy that it was all very uncanny, and that there 
must have been a time when I was perfectly familiar with 
the owld language, as I had such unearthly fondness for it. 

I must have been about seven years old when my parents 



30 ^ MEMOIRS. 

took a house in Arcli Street, above Ninth Street, Phila- 
delphia. Here my life begins to be more marked and dis- 
tinct. I was at first sent, i. e., walked daily to the school of 
Jacob Pierce, a worthy Quaker, who made us call him Jacob, 
and who carefully taught us all the ordinary branches, and 
gave us excellent lectures on natural philosophy and chem- 
istry with experiments, and encouraged us to form mineralo- 
gical collections, but who objected to our reading history, 
" because there were so many battles in it." In which system 
of education all that is good and bad, or rather zveak, in 
Quakerism is fully summed up. Like the Eoman Catholic, 
it is utterly unfit for all the world, and incapable of grap- 
pling with or adapting itself to the natural expansion of 
science and the human mind. Thus the Quaker garb, which 
was originally intended by its simplicity to avoid the appear- 
ance of eccentricity or peculiarity (most dress in the time of 
the Stuarts being extravagant), has now become, by merely 
sticking to old custom, the most eccentric dress known. The 
school was in a very large garden, in which was a gymnasium, 
and in the basement of the main building there was a car- 
penter's shop with a turning-lathe, where boys were allowed 
to work as a reward for good conduct. 

I could never learn the multiplication table. There are 
things which the mind, like the stomach, spasmodically re- 
jects without the least perceptible cause or reason. So I 
have found it to be with certain words which will not be re- 
membered. There was one Arab word which I verily 
believe I looked out one hundred times in the dictionary, and 
repeated a thousand, yet never could keep it. Every teacher 
should be keen to detect these antipathies, and cure them by 
gentle and persuasive means. Unfortunately no one in my 
youth knew any better way to overcome them than by 
" keeping me in " after school to study, when I was utterly 
weary and worn — a very foolish punishment, as is depriving 
a boy of his meals, or anything else levelled at Nature. I 
think there must have been many months of time, and of 



EARLY LIFE. 31 

as much vain and desperate effort on my part to remember, 
wasted on my early arithmetic. Now I can see that by 
retuards or inducements, and by the very simple process 
of only learning " one time one is one " for the first lesson, 
and that and one line more for the second, I could have 
mastered the whole book in time. But oh ! the weary, dreary 
days, and the sad waste of time, and the anxious nervous suf- 
fering, which arithmetic cost me in my youth, and mathe- 
matics in after years ! 

But there was one class at Jacob's in which I was facile- 
pririceps and habitual past-grand-master. This was the class 
which was, like the professorship of Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, 
for Matters and Things in General. That is to say, we read 
aloud from some book — it mav have been selections from 
English writers — and then Jacob, picking out the hard words 
or facts or phrases, required of them definition or explanation. 
One day there arose in these questions a sum in arithmetic, 
when I shot down to the tail of the class as a plummet drops 
to the bottom of the well. I shall never forget the proud 
fierce impatience which I felt, like an imprisoned chieftain 
who knows that he will speedily be delivered and take dire 
vengeance on his foes. I had not long to wait. " ' Refec- 
tory,' what is a 'refectory'? Hillburn Jones, does thee 
know ? Joseph "Widdifield, does thee ? " But none of them 
knew till it came to me "down tail," when I cried "An 
oyster-cellar." " That is quite right, Charley ; thee can go 
up head," said Jacob, and as I passed Hillburn Jones he 
whispered, half in fun, half enviously, the Kemble Refectory." 
This was an oyster-cellar which had been recently opened 
under the Arch Street Theatre, and whence Hillburn and 
I had derived our knowledge of the word, the difference 
being that I remembered more promptly and risked more 
boldly. But I missed it one day when I defined a peasant 
as " a nest full of young birds ; " the fact being that I re- 
called a picture in ^sop's fables, and confused peasant with 
pheasant. One day Jacob rebuked the class for letting me 



32 MEMOIRS. 

always be at their head, when Ilillburn Jones, who was a very 
honest little boy, said, " Indeed, Jacob, thee must know that 
all that we do know, Charley tells us." For I was already 
an insatiable reader, and always recalling what I read, 
and always communicating my knowledge to others in the 
form of small lectures. I had a book of Scripture stories, 
with a picture of Pharoah in his chariot, with the title, 
" Pharaoh's host sunk in the Eed Sea." Hence I concluded 
that a host was a vehicle of a very superior description. A 
carriage-builder in our neighbourhood had executed a chaise 
of very unusual magnificence, and as I stood admiring it I 
informed Hillburn that ^ this was what was called by the 
learned a liost, and that it was in such a host that Pharaoh 
perished. I remember elevating my voice somewhat for the 
benefit of a bystander, being somewhat proud of this bit of 
knowledge. 

Unfortunately, not only my father, but also my teacher, 
and with them the entire poj)ulation of North America, in 
those days regarded a good knowledge of arithmetic as form- 
ing nine-tenths of all that was most needful in education, 
while indulgence in a taste for general information, and 
"literature" especially, was glared at with a very evil eye 
indeed, as tending to injure a "practical business man." 
That there could be any kind of profitable or respectable call- 
ing not based upon arithmetic did not enter into the heart 
of man to conceive, while among the bankers and merchants 
of Boston, New York, or Philadelphia there was a deeply- 
seated conviction that even a wealthy and successful editor,' 
literary man, or artist, was really an inferior as compared to 
themselves. As this sublime truth was severely rubbed into 
me several times daily during the greater portion of my 
youthful life, and as in its earlier stage I rarely met with a 
man grown who did not look down on me as an unfortunate 
non-arithmetical, unbusinesslike creature, and let me know it 
too, I very naturally grew up with a low estimate of my own 
capacities ; and as I was proud and sensitive, this was to me 



EARLY LIFE. 33 

a source of mucli suffering, which often became terrible as I 
advanced in years. But at that time the position of the 
literary man or scholar, with the exception of a very few 
brilliant magnates who had "made money," was in the 
United States not an enviable one. Serious interest in art 
and letters was not understood, or so generally sympathised 
with, as it now is in " Quakerdelphia." There was a gentle- 
man in Philadelphia who was a scholar, and who having lived 
long abroad, had accumulated a very curious black-letter and 
ra7'iora library. For a long time I observed that this library 
was never mentioned in polite circles without significant 
smiles. One day I heard a lady say very meaningly, "I sup- 
pose that you know what kind of books he has and Jiotv he 
oitai7ied tJiem V So I inquired very naturally if he had 
come by them dishonestly. To which the reply, half-whis- 
pered in my ear lest it should be overheard, was, " They say 
his books are all old things, which he did not buy at any first- 
class stores, but picked up at old stalls and in second-hand 
shops at less than their value ; in fact, tliey did not cost Mm 
miLcliP 

Yet these remarks must not be regarded as too sweeping 
or general. Firstly, I am speaking of sixty years since. 
Secondly, there were many people of literary tastes in Phila- 
delphia—a little isolated, it is true ; and finally, there was a 
great culture of science, founded by Franklin, and fostered 
by the medical schools. I could cite a brilliant array of 
names of men distinguished in these matters. What I am 
writing is simply a sincere record of my own— somewhat 
peculiar— or personal experiences. There are doubtless many 
who would write very differently. And now tim.es are very 
greatly changed. 

I have again a quaint early reminiscence. It would hap- 
pen that now and then a new carriage, always of the same 
sober description, with two very good, but seldom showy, 
horses would appear in the streets. Then its OTfner would 
be greeted on Market Street with the remark, " Well, Sammy, 



34 MEMOIRS. 

I see tliee's got thee fifty thousand dollars." This sum— ten 
thousand pounds— constituted the millionaireism or moneyed 
aristocracy of those days. On it, with a thriving business, 
Samuel could maintain a family in good fashion, and above 
all, in great comfort, which was sensibly regarded as better 
than fashion or style. Fifty thousand dollars entitled a man 
to keep a carriage and be classed as " quality " by the negroes. 

It may be worth noting that although the Quakers did 
not allow the piano in their families, as being too worldly, they 
compromised by having musical boxes. And I have heard 
that in the country, where still older fashioned ideas pre- 
vailed, the one bit of finery allowed to a Quaker damsel was 
a red ribbon ; but it must be red, not of any other colour. 

Let it be remembered that at this time Philadelphia, and 
even the world, were as yet to a great degree in the Middle 
Ages as compared to the present day. We had few steam- 
boats, and no railroads, or telephones, or percussion-caps, or 
a tremendous press, or Darwinism, or friction matches. Even 
the introduction of ice-cream, and stone coal as fuel, and 
grates was within the memory of our elders. Apropos of 
matches, the use of tinderbox and brimstone matches was 
universal ; bold young men had tinder pistols ; but the wood 
fire was generally kept under ashes all night, and I can well 
remember how our negro servants, when it had gone out, 
were used early on winter mornings to borrow a shovelful of 
coals from the cook of our next-door neighbour, and how it 
was handed over the garden fence, the recipient standing on 
our pump handle and the donor on hers. 

I forget in what year the railroad (with locomotives) was 
first built from Philadelphia to Columbia, a distance of sixty 
miles. I believe it was the first real road of the kind in 
America. On the day when the first train ran, the City 
Council and certain honoured guests made the journey, and 
among them was my father, who took me with him. There 
were only a few miles of the road then completed. It was a 
stupendous marvel to me, and all this being drawn by steam, 



EARLY LIFE. 35 

and by a great terrible iron monster of a machine. And 
there was still in all souls a certain unearthly awe of the re- 
cently invented and as yet rather rare steamboats. I can 
(strangely enough) still recall this feeling by a mental effort 
— this meeting the Horror for the first time ! My father re- 
membered, and had been in the first steamboat which was a 
success on the Delaware. I saw its wreck in after years at 
Hoboken. The earlier boat made by John Fitch is still pre- 
served in Bordentown. 

I can remember that when gas was introduced to light 
the city, it was done under a fearful opposition. All the 
principal people signed a petition against it. I saw the paper. 
It would burst and kill myriads ; it was poisonous ; and, 
finally, it would ruin the oil trade. However, we got it at 
last. Somebody had invented hand gas-lamps; they were 
sold in the Arcade ; and as one of these had burst, it was 
naturally supposed that the gasworks would do the same. 

The characteristics of old Philadelphia were in those days 
so marked, and are, withal, so sweet to the memory, that I 
cannot help lingering on them. As Washington Irving says 
of the Golden Age of Wouter van Twiller, " Happy days 
when the harvest moon was twice as large as now, when the 
shad were all salmon, and peace was in the land." Trees 
grew abundantly in rows in almost every street — one before 
every house. I had two before mine till 1892, when the 
Street Commissioners heartlessly ordained that one must be 
cut down and removed, and charged me ten dollars for doing 
it. It is needless to say that since Street Commissioners have 
found this so profitable, trees have disappeared with sad ra- 
pidity. Then at twilight the pea-ah of the night-hawk could 
be heard all over Arasapha, which is the Indian name for the 
place where our city stands ; there were in Coaquannoc, or 
the Schuylkill, abundant gold fish and perch, of which I 
angled divers. Yes, there was, and still is, a Fisher Club, 
which claims to be the oldest gentleman's club in Anglo- 
Saxony, and which has for two centuries brewed for itself a 



36 MEMOIRS. 

" fish-house punch " as delicious as that of London civic 
banquets. There be no fish in the fair river now ; they have 
all vanished before the combined forces of petroleum and the 
offal of factories and mines, but the Fish-House Club still has 
its merry banquets in its ancient home ; for, as the French 
say, '•''Chacun peche a sa maniere.'^'' In graveyards lone or 
over gardens green glittered of summer nights millions of 
fireflies ; there was the scent of magnolias, roses, pinks, and 
honeysuckles by every house ; for Philadelphians have always 
had a passion for flowers, and there never was a Quaker, much 
less a Quakeress, who has not studied botany, and wandered 
in Bartram's Garden and culled blue gentians in the early 
fall, or lilies wild in Wissahickon's shade. There still re- 
mains a very beautiful relic of this olden time in the old 
Swedes Church, which every stranger should visit. It is a 
quaint structure of more than two hundred years, and in its 
large churchyard (which is not, like Karamsin's graves, " de- 
serted and drear," but charming and garden-like) one can 
imagine himself in rural England. 

In the spring of the year there was joyous activity on the 
Delav/are, even in town ; for, as the song hath it — 

" De fishin' time hab come at last, 
De winter all am gone and past ; " 

and there was the casting of immense seines and the catching 
of myriads of shad, the typical fish or emblem of the Quaker 
Philadelphian, because in the profile outline of the shad peo- 
ple professed to discern the form according to which the 
Quaker coat was cut. With the shad were many herring, and 
now and then a desperate giant of a sturgeon, who in his 
struggles would give those concerned enough to do. Then 
the yells of the black fishermen, the flapping of the horny 
knife-backed prey — often by the flashing of a night-fire — 
formed a picture worthy of Rembrandt. Apropos of these 
sturgeon, the fresh caviare or roe (which has been pronounced 
at St. Petersburg to surpass the Russian) was always thrown 



EARLY LIFE. '^^ 

away, as was often the case with sweetbreads, which were 
rarely eaten. But if the caviare or roe was really in those 
days " caviare to the general " multitude, the nose of the fish 
Avas not, it being greatly coveted by us small bo3's wherewith 
to make a ball for " shinny," which for some occult reason 
was preferred to any other. Old peoj^le of my acquaintance 
could remember when seals had been killed at Cape May be- 
low the city, and how on one or two occasions a bewildered 
whale of no small dimensions had found its way to Burling- 
ton, some miles above. 

Now and then there would be found in the bay below the 
city a tremendous, square-shaped, hideous, unnatural pisca- 
torial monster, known as a devil-fish, or briefly devil. It was 
a legend of my youth that two preachers or ministers of the 
Presbyterian faith once went fishing in those waters, and 
having cast out a stout line, fastened to the mast, for shark, 
were amazed at finding themselves all at once careering 
through the waves at terrible speed, being dragged by one of 
the diabolical " monsters of the roaring deep " above men- 
tioned. Whereupon a friend, who was in the boat, burst 
out laughing. And being asked, " Wherefore this unre- 
strained hilarity ? " replied, " Is it not enough to make a man 
laugh to see the Devil running away with two clergymen ? " 

There was a very excellent and extensive museum of Mat- 
ters and Things in General, founded by an ancient artist 
named Peale, who was the head-central charm and delight of 
all young Philadelphia in those days, and where, v/hen we 
had been good all the week, we were allowed to repair on 
Saturday afternoons. And here I may say by the way, that 
miscellaneous collections of " curiosities," oddities, and relics 
are far more attractive to children, and stimulate in them 
far more interest and inquisitiveness and desire for general 
information, than do the best scientific collections, where 
everything is ranked and numbered, and wherein even an 
Etruscan tiara or a Viking's sword loses much of its charm 
when placed simply as a " specimen " in a row of others of 



38 MEMOIRS. 

the kind. I am not arguing here in the least against scien- 
tific or properly arranged arch£eologic collections, but to de- 
clare the truth that for children museums of the despised 
curiosities are far more attractive and infinitely more useful. 

I owe so very much myself to the old Peale's Museum ; it 
served to stimulate to such a remarkable degree my interest 
in antiquities and my singular passion for miscellaneous in- 
formation, and it aided me so much in my reading, that I 
cannot pass it by without a tribute to its memory. How 
often have I paused in its dark galleries in awe before the 
tremendous skeleton of the Mammoth — how small did that 
of a great elephant seem beside it — and recalled the Indian 
legend of it recorded by Franklin. And the stuffed monkeys 
— one shaving another — what exquisite humour, which never 
palled upon us ! No ; that was the museum for us, and the 
time will come when there will be such collections made ex- 
pressly for the young. 

" Stuffed monkey " was a common by- word, by the way, 
for a conceited fellow. Therefore the Louisville Journal^ 
speaking of a rival sheet, said : " Eeader, if you v/ill go into the 
Louisville Museum, you will see two stuffed monkeys reading 
the Courier. And if you will then go into the office of the 
Louisville Courier^ you may see two living stuffed monkeys 
editing the same." The beautiful sallies of this kind which 
appeared in these two newspapers for years would make a 
lively volume. 

Never shall I forget one evening alone in that Museum. 
I had come with Jacob Pierce's school, and strayed off alone 
into some far-away and fascinating nook, forgetful of friends 
and time. All the rest had departed homewards, and I 
sought to find them. The dark evening shades were casting 
sombre tones in the galleries — I was a very little boy of seven 
or eight — and the stuffed lions and bears and wolves seemed 
looming or glooming into mysterious life ; the varnished 
sharks and hideous shiny crocodiles had a light of awful in- 
telligence in their eyes ; the gigantic anaconda had long 



EARLY LIFE. 39 

awaited me ; the grim hyaena marked me for his own ; even 
deer and doves seemed uncanny and goblined. At this long 
interval of sixty years, I can recall the details of that walk, 
and every object which impressively half-appalled me, and 
how what had been a museum had become a chamber of 
horrors, yet not without a wild and awful charm. Of course 
I lost my way in the shades, and was beginning to speculate 
on having to pass a night among the monsters, and how 
much there would be left for my friends to mourn over in 
the morning, when — Eureka ! Thalatta ! — I beheld the gate 
of entrance and exit, and made my latter as joyously as ever 
did the souls who were played out of Inferno by the old rep- 
robate of the Roman tale. 

Since that adventure I never mentioned it to a livins: 
soul till now, and yet there is not an event of my life so 
vividly impressed on my memory. 

My father took me very rarely to the theatre ; but my 
Quaker school-mates had never seen the inside of such places 
at all, and therefore listened greedily to w^hat I could tell 
them of the sights. One of the wonders of my youth was 
the seeing the great elephant Columbus perform in a play 
called " The Englishman in Siam." It was indeed very 
curious, and it is described as such in works on natural his- 
tory. And I saw Edwin Forrest (whom I learned to know 
in later years) in " Metamora," and Fanny Kemble in " Bea- 
trice," and so on. As for George Boker, he went, I believe, 
to every place of amusement whenever he pleased, and talked 
familiarly of actors, some of v/hom he actually knew, and 
their lives, in a manner which awoke in me awe and a feel- 
ing as being humble and ignorant indeed. As we grew older, 
Boker and I, from reading " Don Quixote " and Scott, used 
to sit together for hours improvising legends of chivalry and 
marvellous romances. It was in the year when it first ap- 
peared that I read (in the Neii^ Montlily) and got quite by 
heart the rhyming tale of " Sir Rupert the Fearless," a tale 
of the Rhine, one of the Ingoldsby legends, by Barham. I 



40 MEMOIRS. 

can still repeat a great part of it. I bore it in mind till in 
after years it inspired (allied to Goethe's Wassermddchen) my 
ballad of De Maiden mit Nodings 07i, which has, as I now 
write, been very recently parodied and pictured by Punchy 
March 18, 1893. My mother had taught me to get poetry 
by heart, and by the time I was ten years of age, I had 
imbibed, so to speak, an immense quantity ; for, as in 
opium-eating, those who begin by effort end by taking in 
with ease. 

There was something else so very characteristic of old 
Philadelphia that I will not pass it by. In the fall of the 
year the reed-bird, which is quite as good as the ortolan of 
Italy, and very much like it (I prefer the reed-bird), came in 
large flocks to the marshes and shores of the Delaware and 
Schuylkill. Then might be seen a quaint and marvellous 
sight of men and boys of all ages and conditions, with fire- 
arms of every faculty and form, followed by dogs of every 
degree of badness, in all kinds of boats, among which the 
iateau of boards predominated, intermingled with an occa- 
sional Maryland dug-out or poplar canoe. Many, however, 
crept on foot along the shore, and this could be seen below 
the Navy Yard even within the city limits. Then, as flock 
after flock of once bobolinks and now reed-birds rose or fell 
in flurried flight, there would be such a banging, cracking, 
and barking as to suggest a South American revolution aided 
by blood-hounds. That somebody in the melee now and then 
got a charge of shot in his face, or that angry parties in dis- 
pute over a bird sometimes blazed away at one another and 
fought a Voiitrance in every way, " goes without saying." 
Truly they were inspiriting sights, and kept up the martial 
valour, aided by frequent firemen's fights, which made Phila- 
delphians so indomitable in the Rebellion, v/hen, to the 
amazement of everybody, our Quaker city manifested a 
genius or love for hard fighting never surpassed by mortals. 

There were, of course, some odd episodes among the in- 
fantry or gunners on foot, and one of these was so well 



EARLY LIFE. 41 

described by my brother Henry in a poem, that I venture to 
give it place. 

REED-BIRDINa. 

Two men and a bull-dog ugly, 

Two guns and a terrier lame ; 
They'd better stick out in the marsh there, 

And set themselves up for game. 

But no ; I mark by the cocking 

Of that red-haired Paddy's eye, 
He's been " reeding " too much for you, sir, 

Any such game to try. 

" Now, Jamie, ye divil, kape dark there, 

And hould the big bull-dog in ; 
There's a bloody big crowd of rade-birds, 

That nade a pepperin' ! " 

Ker-rack ! goes the single barrel, 

Flip-hoong ! roars the old Queen Anne ; 

There's a Paddy stretched out in the mud-hole, 
A kicked-over, knocked-down man. 

" Och, Jamie, ye shtupid crature. 

Sure ye're the divil's son ; 
How many fingers' load, thin, 

Did ye putt in this d d ould gun ? " 

" How many fingers, be jabers? 

I nivir putt in a wan ; 
Did ye think I'd be afther jammin' 

Me fingers into a gun % " 

" Well, give me the powder, Jamie." 

" The powder ! as sure as I'm born, 
I put it all into yer musket. 

For I'd nivir a powder-horn ! " 

Then we all had reed-bird suppers or lunches, eked out 
perhaps with terrapins and soft-shell crabs, gumbo, " snap- 
per," or pepper-pot soup, peaches, venison, bear-meat, selon 
la saiso7i — for both bear and deer roamed wild within fifty or 
sixty miles — so that, all things considered, if Philadelphians 



42 MEMOIRS. 

and Baltimoreans did run somewhat over-mucli to eating up 
their intellects — as Dr. Holmes declares they do — they had 
at least the excuse of terrible temptation, which the men of 
my " grandfather-land " (New England), as he once termed 
it in a letter to me, very seldom had at any time. 

Once it befell, though a few years later, that one winter 
there was a broad fair field of ice just above Fairmount dam, 
which is about ten feet high, that about a hundred and fifty 
men and maidens were merrily skating by moonlight. I 
know not whether Colonel James Page, our great champion 
skater, was there cutting High Dutch ; but this I know, that 
all at once, by some strange rising of the stream, the whole 
flake of ice and its occupants went over the dam. Strangely 
enough, no one was killed, but very few escaped without in- 
jury, and for some time the surgeons were busy. It would 
make a strange wild picture that of the people struggling in 
the broken floes of ice among the roaring waters. 

And again, during a week on the same spot, some practi- 
cal joker amused himself with a magic-lantern by making a 
spirit form flit over the fall, against its face, or in the misty 
air. The whole city turned out to see it, and great was their 
marvelling, and greater the fear among the negroes at the 
apparition. 

Sears 0. Walker, who was an intimate friend, kept a 
school in Sansom Street, to which I was transferred. I was 
only seven years old at the time, and being the youngest, he 
made, when I was introduced, a speech of apology to his 
pupils. He was a good kind man, who also, like Jacob, gave 
us lectures on natural philosophy and chemistry. There I 
studied French, and began to learn to draw, but made little 
progress, though I worked hard. I have literally never met 
in all my life any person with so little natural gift or aptitude 
for learning languages or drawing as I have ; and if I have 
since made an advance in both, it has been at the cost of 
such extreme labour as would seem almost incredible. 

I was greatly interested in chemistry, as a child would be, 



EARLY LIFE. 43 

and, having heard Mr. Walker say something about the colour- 
ing matter in quartz, resolved on a great invention which 
should immortalise my name. My teacher used to make his 
own ink by pounding nut-galls in an iron mortar. I got a 
piece of coarse rock-crystal, pounded it up in the same mor- 
tar, pouring water on it. Sure enough the result was a pale 
ink, which the two elder pupils, who had maliciously aided 
and encouraged me, declared was of a very superior quality. 
I never shall forget the pride I felt. I had, first of all sci- 
entists, extracted the colouring matter from quartz ! The 
recipe was at once written out, with a certificate at the end, 
signed by my two witnesses, that they had witnessed the 
l^rocess, and that this was written with the ink itself ! This 
I gave to Mr. Walker, and could not understand why he 
laughed so heartily at it. It was not till several days after 
that he explained to me that the ink was the result of the 
dregs of the nut-galls which remained in the mortar. 

We had not many books, but what we had I read and re- 
read with great assiduity. Among them were Cooper's nov- 
els, Campbell's poems, those of Byron, and above all, Wash- 
ington Irving's " Sketch Book," which had great influence 
on me, inspiring that intense love for old English literature 
and its associations which has ever since been a part of my 
very soul. Irving was indeed a wonderful, though not a 
startling genius ; but he had sympathised himself into such 
appreciation of the golden memories and sweet melodies of 
the olden time, be it American or English, as no writer now 
possesses. In my eighth year I loved deeply his mottoes, 
such as that from Syr Grey Steel : — 

" He that supper for is dight, 
He lies full cold I trow this night ; 
Yestreen to chamber I him led, 
This nighte Grey Steel has made his bed." 

Lang — not Andrew — has informed us that no copy of 
the first black-letter edition of Sir Grey Steel is known to 
exist. In after years I found in the back binding of an old 



44: MEMOIRS. 

folio two pieces of it, each about four inches square. It has 
been an odd fatality of mine that whenever a poet existed in 
black-letter, I was always sure to peruse him first in that 
type, which I always from childhood preferred to any other. 
To this day I often dream of being in a book-shop, turning 
over endless piles of marvellously quaint parchment bound 
books in letres hlake^ and what is singular, they are gener- 
ally works quite unknown to the world — first discoveries — 
unique ! And then — oh ! then — how bitter is the waking ! 

There was in Mr. Walker's school library a book, one well 
known as Mrs. Trimmer's " Natural History." This I read, 
as usual, thoroughly and often, and wrote my name at the 
end, ending with a long snaky flourish. Years passed by, 
and I was at the University, when one evening, dropping in 
at an auction, I bought for six cents, or threepence, " a blind 
bundle " of six books tied up with a cord. It was a bargain, 
for I found in it in good condition the first American edi- 
tions of De Quincey's " Opium-Eater," " The Rejected Ad- 
dresses," and the Poems of Coleridge. But what startled me 
was a familiar-looking copy of Mrs. Trimmer's " Natural His- 
tory," in which at the end was my boyish signature. 

"And still wider." In 1887 I passed some weeks at a 
hotel in Venice. A number of Italian naval officers dined at 
our ta'ble-d''7i6te every evening. One of them showed us an 
intaglio which he had bought. It represented a hunter on 
an elephant firing at a tiger. The owner wished to know 
something about it. Baron von Rosenfeld, a chamberlain of 
the Emperor of Austria, remarked at once that it was as old 
as the days of flint-locks, because smoke was rising from the 
lock of the gun. I felt that I knew more about it, but could 
not at once recall what I knew, and said that I would explain 
it the next day. And going into the past, I remembered 
that this very scene was the frontispiece to Mrs. Trimmer's 
" Natural History." I think that some gem engraver, pos- 
sibly in India, had copied it to order. I can even now recall 
many other things in the book, but attribute my retention of 



EARLY LIFE. 45 

SO much which I have read 7iot to a good memory, such as 
the mathematician has, which grasps directly^ hut simply to 
frequent reading and mental reviewing or revising. Where 
there has been none of this, I forgot everything in a short 
time. 

My father took in those years BlachwoocPs and the New 
Monthly Magazine^ and as I read every line of them, they 
were to me a vast source of knowledge. I remember an epi- 
gram by " Martial in London " in the latter : — 

" In Craven Street, Strand, four attorneys find place, 
And four dark coal-barges are moored at the base ; 
Fly, Honesty, fly — seek some safer retreat, 
For there's craft on the river, and craft in the street." 

I never pass by Craven Street without recalling this, and 
so it has come to pass that by such memories and associations 
London in a thousand ways is alwa3^s reviving my early life 
in America. 

The Nodes Amirosiance puzzled me, as did the Bible, but 
I read, read, read, toiijours. My uncle Amos lent me the 
" Arabian Nights," though my father strictly prohibited it. 
But the zest of the forbidden made me study it with won- 
drous love. The reader may laugh, but it is a fact that hav- 
ing obtained " Mother Goose's Melodies," I devoured them 
with a strange interest reflected from Washington Irving. 
The truth is, that my taste had been so precociously devel- 
oped, that I unconsciously found a literary merit or charm 
in them as I did in all fairy-tales, and I remember being 
most righteously indignant once when a young bookseller 
told me that I was getting to be too old to read such stuflt ! 
The truth was, that I was just getting to be old enough to 
appreciate it as folk-lore and literature, which he never 
did. 

The great intellectual influence which acted on me most 
powerfully after Irving was an incomplete volume of about 
1790, called " The Poetical Epitome." It consisted of many 
of Percy's " Eelics " with selections of ballads, poems, and 



46 MEMOIRS. 

epigrams of many eminent writers. I found it a few years 
after at a boarding-school, where I continually read it as 
before. 

As I was backward in my studies, my parents, very inju- 
diciously so far as learning was concerned, removed me from 
Mr. Walker's school, and put me under the care of T. Bron- 
son Alcott, who had just come to Philadelphia. This was 
indeed going from the frying-pan into the very fire, so far as 
curing idleness and desultory habits and a tendency to ro- 
mance and wild speculation was concerned. For Mr. Alcott 
was the most eccentric man who ever took it on himself to 
train and form the youthful mind. He did not really teach 
any practical study ; there was indeed some pretence at geog- 
raphy and arithmetic, but these we were allowed to neglect 
at our own sweet will. His forte was " moral influence " and 
" sympathetic intellectual communion " by talking ; and oh, 
heaven ! what a talker he was ! He was then an incipient 
Transcendentalist, and he did not fail to discover in me the 
seeds of the same plant. He declared that I had a marvellous 
imagination, and encouraged my passion for reading anything 
and everything to the very utmost. It is a fact that at nine 
years of age his disquisitions on and readings from Spenser's 
" Faerie Queen " actually induced me to read the entire work, 
of which he was very proud, reminding me of it in 1881, 
when I went to Harvard to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa poem. 
He also read thoroughly into us the " Pilgrim's Progress," 
Quarles's " Emblems," Xorthcote's " Fables," much Shake- 
speare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Milton, all of which sunk 
into my very soul, educating me indeed " ideally " as no boy 
perhaps in Philadelphia had ever been educated, at the utter 
cost of all real " education." It was a great pity, and pity 
'tis 'tis true. The word ideal was ever in his mouth. All of 
the new theories, speculations, or fads which were beginning 
to be ventilated among the Unitarian liberal clergy found 
ready welcome in his dreamy brain, and he retailed them all 
to his pupils, among whom I was certainly the only one who 



EARLY LIFE. 47 

took them in and seriously thought them over. Yet I cannot 
say that I really liked the man himself. He was not to me 
exactly sympathetic-human. Such training as his would de- 
velop in any boy certain weaknesses — and I had mine — which 
were very repulsive to my father, who carried plain common- 
sense to extremes, and sometimes into its opposite of uncon- 
scious eccentricity, though there was no word which he so 
much hated. 

Bulwer's " Last Days of Pompeii," " The Disowned," and 
" Pilgrims of the Rhine " made a deep and lasting impression 
on me. I little thought then that I should in after years be 
the guest of the author in his home, and see the skull of 
Arbaces. Oh, that by some magic power every author could 
be made to feel all the influence, all the charm, which his art 
exerts on his readers, and especially the young. Sometimes, 
now and then, by golden chance, a writer of books does realise 
this, and then feels that he has lived to some purpose. Once 
it happened to me to find a man, an owner of palaces and 
millions, who had every facility for becoming familiar with 
far greater minds and books than mine, who had for years 
collected with care and read everything which I had ever 
written. He actually knew more about my books than I did. 
I was startled at the discovery as at a miracle. And if the 
reader knew luliat a melange I have written, he would not 

wonder at it. 

It is very probable that no man living appreciates the vast 
degree to which any book whatever which aims at a little 
more than merely entertaining, and appeals at all to thought, 
influences the world, and how many readers it gets. There 
are books, of which a thousand copies were never sold, which 
have permeated society and been the argument of national 
revolutions. Such a book was the "Political Economy" of 
H. 0. Carey, of which I possess the very last copy of the first, 
and I believe the only, edition. And there are novels which 
have gone to the three hundred thousand, of whose authors 
it may be said that 



48 MEMOIRS. 

" Over the barren desert of their brains 
There never strayed the starved camel of an idea," 

and whose works vanish like wind. 

What is very remarkable is the manner in which even the 
great majority of readers confuse these two classes, and be- 
lieve that mere popular success is cori-elative with genius and 
desert. A great cause of this really Aulgar error is the grow- 
ing conviction that artistic skill alone determines merit in lit- 
erature, and that intellect, as the French, beginning mildly 
with Voltaire and ending violently with Sainte-Beuve, assert 
is of far less importance than style. "Xe style^ c'est Vesprit 
du siecle.^^ Apropos of which I remarked that in the war- 
like Middle Age in France the motto might have been 
'•'•Vliomme c'est le steel." Then came the age of wigs, 
when the cry was, '•'- Lliomme c'est le style." And now we 
are in the swindling and bogus-company-promoting age, 
when it might be proclaimed that '^Lliomme c''est le steal." 

There was another book ^ which I read through and 
through in early childhood to gre6.t profit. This was Cottle's 
"Alfred," an epic of some merit, mit chiefly in this, that it sets 
forth tolerably clearly the old Norse life and religion. George 
Boker owned and gave me some time after a book entitled 
" Five Norse Poems," in the original, and translated. This 
with Grey's poems, which latter I possessed, laid the basis 
for a deep interest in after years in Northern antiquities ; 
they were soon followed by Mallett ; and if I have since read 
many sagas in Icelandic and studied with keenest interest the 
museums of the North, the first incentive thereto came from 
my boyish reading. When I was sixteen I executed a poetic, 
version of the " Death Song of Eegner Lodbrog," which, 
though it was never published, I think was at least as good 
as any translation which I have since executed, " however 
that may be." I very seriously connected this Norse spirit 
with my grandfather and his stern uncles and progenitors, 
who had fought in Canada and in the icy winters of New 
England ; grim men they were all ; and I daresay that I was 



EARLY LIFE. 49 

quite right. It always seems to me that among these alter- 
nately fighting and farming Icelanders I am among my Le- 
land relatives ; and I even once found Uncle Seth in his red 
waistcoat in the Burnt Njals saga to the life. There was a 
paragraph, as I write, recently circulating in the newspapers, 
in which I was compared in appearance to an old grey Vi- 
king, and it gave me a strange uncanny thrill, as if the writer 
of it were a wizard who had revealed a buried secret. 

My parents, on coming to Philadelphia, had at first at- 
tended the Episcopal church, but finding that most of their 
New England friends held to the Eev. AV. H. (now Dr.) Fur- 
ness, an Unitarian, they took a pew in his chapel. After fif- 
teen years they returned to the Episcopal faith, but allowed 
me to keep the pew to myself for one or two years, till I went 
to college. In Dr. Eurness's chapel I often heard Channing 
and all the famous Unitarian divines of the time preach, and 
very often saw Miss Harriet Martineau, Dr. Combe, the 
phrenologist, and many other distinguished persons. In 
other places at different times I met Andrew Jackson, Henry 
Clay, to whom I was introduced, Daniel Webster, to whom I 
reverently bowed, receiving in return a gracious acknowledg- 
ment, Peter Duponceau, Morton, Stephen Girard, Joseph 
Buonaparte, the two authors of the " Jack Downing Let- 
ters"; and I once heard David Crockett make a speech. 
Apropos of Joseph Buonaparte, I can remember to have 
heard my wife's mother, the late Mrs. Eodney Eisher, tell 
how when a little girl, and while at his residence at Borden- 
town, she had run a race with the old ex-king of Spain. A 
very intimate friend in our family was Professor John Erost, 
the manufacturer of literally innumerable works of every 
description. He had many thousands of woodcut blocks, and 
when he received an order — as, for example, a history of any 
country, or of the world, or of a religion, or a school geog- 
raphy, or book of travel or adventure, or a biography, or 
anything else that the heart of man could conceive — he set 
his scribes to write, scissors and j)aste, and lo ! the book was 



50 MEMOIRS. 

made forthwith, he aiding and revising it. What was most 
remarkable was that many of these jneces de manufacture 
were rather clever, and very well answered the demand, for 
their sale was enormous. He had when young been in the 
West Indies, and written a clever novelette entitled " Eamon, 
the Eover of Cuba." Personally he was very handsome, re- 
fined, and intelligent; a man meant by Xature for higher 
literary work than mere book-making. 

Miss Eliza Leslie, the writer of the best series of sketches 
of American domestic life of her day, was a very intimate 
friend of my mother, and a constant visitor at our house. 
She was a sister of Leslie, the great artist, and had been in 
her early life much in England. I was a great favourite 
with her, and owed much to her always entertaining and 
very instructive conversation, which was full of reminiscences 
of distiuguished people and remarkable events. I may say 
with great truth that I really profited as much by mere hear- 
ing as many boys would have done by knowing the originals, 
so deep was the interest which I felt in all that I heard, and 
so eager my desire to learn to know the world. 

Then I was removed, and with good cause, from Mr. Al- 
cott's school, for he had become so very " ideal " or eccentric 
in his teaching and odd methods of punishment by torment- 
ing without ever whipping, that people could not endure his 
purely intellectual system. So for one winter, as my health 
was bad and I was frequently ill, for a long time I was 
allowed to do nothing but attend a writing-school kept by a 
Mr. Eand. At the end of the season, he sadly admitted that 
I still wrote badly ; I think he pronounced me the worst and 
most incurable case of bad writing which he had ever attend- 
ed. In 1849 Judge (then Mr.) Cadwallader, with whom I 
was studying law, said that he admired my engrossing hand 
more than any he had ever seen except one. As hands go 
round the clock, our hands do change. 

I was to go the next summer to New England with my 
younger brother, Henry Perry Leland, to be placed in the 



EARLY LIFE. 51 

celebrated boarding-school of Mr. Charles W. Greene, at 
Jamaica Plains, five miles from Boston ; which was done, and 
with this I enter on a new phase of life, of which I have very 
vivid reminiscences. Let me state that we first went to 
Dedham and stayed some weeks. There I found living with 
his father, an interesting boy of my own age, named Wil- 
liam Joshua Barney, a grandson of the celebrated Com- 
modore Barney, anent whom was written the song, " Barney, 
leave the girls alone," apropos of his having been allowed to 
kiss Marie Antoinette and all her maids of honour. William 
had already been at Mr. Greene's school, and we soon became 
intimate. 

During this time my father hired a chaise ; I borrowed 
William's shot-gun, and we went together on a delightful tour 
to visit all our relations in Holliston, Milford, and elsewhere. 
At one time we stopped to slay an immense black snake ; at 
another to shoot wild pigeons, and " so on about " to Prov- 
idence and many places. From cousins who lived in old 
farmhouses in wild and remote places I received Indian ar- 
row-heads and a stone tomahawk, and other rustic curiosities 
dear to my heart. At the Fremont House in Boston my 
father showed me one day at dinner several foreign gentle- 
men of different nations belonging to different Legations. 
In Rhode Island I found by a stream several large pot-holes in 
rocks of which I had read, and explained to my father (grave- 
ly as usual) how they were made by eddies of water and 
gravel-stones. One day my father in Boston took me to see 
a marvellous white shell from China, valued at one hundred 
pounds. What was the amazement of all present to hear me 
give its correct Latin name, and relate a touching tale of a 
sailor who, finding such a shell when shipwrecked on a 
desert island, took it home with him, " and was thereby raised 
(as I told them) from poverty to affluence." Which tale I 
had read the week before in a children's magazine, and, as 
usual, reflected deeply on it, resolving to keep my eye on all 
shells in future, in the hope of something turning up. 



52 MEMOIRS. 

I was not^ however, a little prig who bored people with 
my reading, for I have heard old folk say that there was a 
quaint naivete and droll seriousness, and total unconscious- 
ness of superior information in my manner, which made these 
outpourings of mine very amusing. I think I was a kind of 
little Paul Dombey, unconsciously odd, and perhaps in- 
nocently Quaker-like. I could never understand why Aunt 
Nancy, and many more, seemed to be so much amused at 
serious and learned examples and questions which I laid down 
to them. For though they did not " smile outright," I had 
learned to penetrate the New England ironical glance and 
satirical intonation. My mother said that, when younger, I, 
having had a difficulty of some kind with certain street-boys, 
came into the house with my eyes filled with tears, and said, 
" I told them that they were evil-minded, but they laughed 
me to scorn." On another occasion, when some vagabond 
street-boys asked me to play with them, I gravely declined, 
on the ground that I must " Shun bad company " — this 
phrase being the title of a tract which I had read, and the 
boys corresponding in appearance to a picture of sundry 
young ragamuffins on its title-page. 

My portrait had been admirably painted in Philadelphia 
by Mrs. Darley, the daughter of Sully, who, I believe, put 
the finishing touches to it. "When Mr. Walker saw it, he re- 
marked that it looked exactly as if Charley were just about 
to tell one of his stories. At the time I was reading for the 
first time " The Child's Own Book," an admirable large col- 
lection of fairy-tales and strange adventures, which kept me 
in fairy-land many a time while I lay confined to bed for 
weeks with pleurisies and a great variety of afflictions, for in 
this respect I suffered far more than most children. 



EARLY LIFE. 53 

AT SCHOOL IN NEW ENGLAND. 

Mr. Charles W. Greene was a portly, ruddy, elderly 
Boston gentleman of good family, who had been in early 
life attached in some diplomatic capacity to a Legation, and 
had visited Constantinople. I think that he had met with 
reverses, but having some capital, had been established by 
his many friends as a schoolmaster. He was really a fine old 
gentleman, with a library full of old books, and had Madeira 
in quaint little old bottles, on which, stamped in the glass, 
one could read Greene 1735. He had a dear little wife, 
and both were as kind to the boys as possible. Once, and 
once only, when I had really been very naughty, did he pun- 
ish me. He took me solemnly into the library (oh, what 
blessed beautiful reading I often had there !), and, after a 
solemn speech, and almost with tears in his eyes, gave me 
three blows with a folded newspaper ! That was enough. 
If I had been flayed with a rope's end, it would not have had 
a greater moral effect than it did. 

Everything was very English and old-fashioned about the 
place. The house was said in 1835 to be a hundred and fifty 
years old, having been one of the aristocratic Colonial 
manors. One building after another had been added to it, 
and the immense elms which grew about testified to its age. 
The discipline or training was eminently adapted to make 
young gentlemen of us all. There was almost no immorality 
among the boys, and no fighting whatever. The punish- 
ments were bad marks, and for every mark a boy was obliged 
to go to bed an hour earlier than the others. Extreme cases 
of wickedness were punished by sending boys to bed in the 
daytime. When two were in a room, and thus confined, they 
used to relieve the monotony of their imprisonment by fight- 
ing with pillows. Those who had bad marks were also con- 
fined within certain bounds. Good boys, or those especially 
favoured, were allowed to chop kindling wood, or do other 
light work, for which they were paid three cents per hour. 



5j, MEMOIRS. 

The boy who was first down in the morning had an apple 
given to him. This apple was greatly despised by the bolder 
spirits, who taunted those who arose promptly with a desire 
to obtain it. 

Candour compels me to admit that, as a teacher of learn- 
ing, Mr. Greene was not pre-eminent. He had two school- 
rooms, and employed for each as good a teacher as he could 
hire. But we were not at all thoroughly well taught, al- 
though we were kept longer in the schoolroom than was 
really good for us ; for in summer we had an hour's study 
before breakfast, then from nine till twelve, and again from 
two to five. In winter we had, instead of the early lesson, 
an hour in the evening. Something was wanting in the sys- 
tem, and I believe that after a year and a half I knew no 
more, as regards studies, than I did when I first entered. 

When a boy's birthday came, he was allowed to have 
some special dainty for us all. I was very much disgusted 
with the Boston boys when they selected pork and beans, 
which I loathed. Some would choose plum-pudding, others 
apple-pies. There were always two or three dishes for break- 
fast, as, for instance, fried potatoes and butter, or cold meat, 
or pan-dowdy — a kind of coarse and broken up apple-pie — 
with the tea and bread and coffee, but we could onlv eat of 
one. There was rather too much petty infant-schoolery in 
all this, but we got on very well. Pepper and mustard were 
forbidden, but I always had a great natural craving for these, 
and when I asked for them, Mr. Greene would shake his 
head, but always ended by handing them to me. He was a 
Ion vivant himself, and sympathised with me. There were 
one or two books also of a rather peppery or spicy nature in 
his library, such as a collection of rollicking London songs, 
at which he likewise shook his head when I asked for them 
— but I got them. There I read for tlie first time all of 
Walter Scott's novels, and the Percy Ballads, and some of 
Marryatt's romances, and Hood's Annual, and Dr. Holmes's 
first poems. 



EARLY LIFE. 55 

There was in Mr. Greene's library a very curious and now 
rare work in three volumes, published in Boston at some 
time in the twenties, called " The Marvellous Depository." 
It consisted of old legends of Boston, such as the story of 
" Peter Rugff," " Tom Walker and the Devil," " The Golden 
Tooth," " Captain Kidd," " The Witch Flymaker," and an ad- 
mirable collection of unearthly German tales, such as " The 
Devil's Elixir," by Hoffmann (abridged), " Jacob the Bowl," 
" Rubezahl," " Der Freyschutz," and many more, but all of 
the unearthly blood-curdling kind. Singly, they were appall- 
ing enough to any one in those days when the supernatural 
still thrilled the strongest minds, but taken altogether for 
steady reading, the book was a perfect Sabbat of deviltry and 
dramatic horrors. The tales were well told, or translated in 
very simple but vigorous English, and I pored over the col- 
lection and got it by heart, and borrowed it, and took it to 
Dedham in the holidays, and into the woods, where I read it 
in sunshine or twilight shade by the rippling river, under 
wild rocks, and so steeped my soul in the supernatural, that 
I seemed to live a double life. As was natural, my school- 
mates read and liked such tales, but they sunk into my very 
soul, and took root, and grew up into a great overshadowing 
forest, while with others they were only as dwarf bushes, if 
they grew at all. All of this — though I did not know it — 
was unconsciously educating my bewitched mind to a deep 
and very precocious passion for mediaeval and black-letter 
literature and occult philosophy, which was destined to 
manifest itself within a few years. 

There was another book which greatly influenced my 
mind and life. I have forgotten the title, but it was a very 
remarkable collection of curiosities, such as accounts of a 
family of seven children who had every one some strange 
peculiarity, dwarfs and giants, and mysteriously-gifted mor- 
tals, and all kinds of odd beings and inventions. I obtained 
it in a very mysterious way ; for one day I found it in my 
desk, a blessed gift indeed from some unknown friend who 



56 MEMOIRS. 

had rightly judged of my tastes. This work I literally lived 
upon for a long time. Once a lady friend of my mother's 
came in winter and took me a-sleighing, but I had my dear 
book under my jacket, and contrived now and then to re-read 
some anecdote in it. In after years I found a copy of it in 
the Mercantile Library, Philadelphia, but I have never seen 
it elsewhere.* I had at Mr. Alcott's carefully studied all the 
Percy Anecdotes, and could repeat most of them when re- 
called by some association ; also Goldsmith's " Animated 
Nature," the perusal of which latter work was to me as the 
waving of a forest and the sighing of deep waters. Then, 
too, I had read — in fact I owned — the famous Peter Parley 
books, which gave me, as they have to thousands of boys, a 
desire to travel and see the world. I marvelled greatly at 
finding that Peter Parley himself, or Mr. S. G. Goodrich, had 
a beautiful country-house very near our school, and his son 
Frank, who was a very pleasant and wonderfully polite and 
sunshiny boy, sat by me in school. Frank Goodrich in after 
life wrote a novel entitled " Flirtation and its Consequences," 
of which my brother said, " What are its consequences, 
Frank; good rich husbands? By no means." I can re- 
member being invited to a perfectly heavenly garden-party 
at the Goodrichs', and evening visits there with my mother. 
And I may note by the way, that Frank himself lived abroad 
in after j^ears ; that his father became the American Consul 

* Since writing the foregoing, and by a most appropriately odd co- 
incidence or mere chance, I have received with delight a copy of this 
work from Jesse Jaggard, a well-known dealer in literary curiosities in 
Liverpool, who makes a specialty of hunting up rarities to order, which 
is of itself a quaint business. The book is entitled " Curiosities for the 
Ingenious, Selected from the Most Authentic Treasures of Nature, 
Science and Art, Biography, History, and General Literature. London : 
Thomas Boys, Ludgate Hill, 1821." Boys was the publisher of the cele- 
brated series of " The Percy Anecdotes." I should here, in justice to 
Mr. Jaggard, mention that I am indebted to him for obtaining for me 
several rare and singular works, and that his catalogues are remarkably 
well edited. 



EARLY LIFE. 57 

in Paris, and that in 1848 lie introduced to the Gouverne- 
merit Fr^ovisoire the American delegation, of which I was 
one, and how we were caricatured in the Oharivari, in which 
caricature I was specially depicted, the likeness being at once 
recognised by everybody, and how I knew nothing of it all 
till I v/as told about it by the beautiful Miss Goodrich, 
Frank's younger sister, on a Staten Island steamboat, many, 
many years after. And as a postscript I may add, that it is 
literally true that before I was quite twenty- three years of age I 
had been twice caricatured or pictorially jested on in the 
Munich Fliegcnde Blatter and twice in the Paris Charivari, 
Avhich may show that I was to a certain degree about town in 
those days, as I indeed was. Wliile I am about it, I may as 
well tell the Munich tale. There was a pretty governess, a 
great friend of mine, who had charge of two children. Meet- 
ing her one day in the park, at a sign from me she pressed 
the children's hats down over their eyes with " Kinder, setzt 
eure Hiite fester auf ! " and in that blessed instant cast up 
her beautiful lips and was kissed. I don't know whether 
we were overseen ; certain it is that in the next number of 
the Fliegencle Blatter the scene Avas well depicted, with the 
words. The other instance was this. One evening I met in 
a Bierlialle a sergeant of police v/ith whom I fraternised. I 
remember that he could talk modern Greek, having learned 
it in Greece. This was very infra dig. indeed for a student, 
and one of my comrades said to me that, as I was a foreigner, 
I was probably not aware of what a fault I had committed, 
but that in future I must not be seen talking to a soldier. 
To which I, with a terrible wink, replied, "Mum's the 
word ; that soldier is lieutenant of police in my luard, and I 
have squared it with him all right, so that if there should be 
a Bierhrawall (a drunken row) in our quarter he will let me 
go." This, which appeared as a grand flight of genial genius 
to a German, speedily went through all the students' hieipe, 
and soon appeared, very well illustrated, in the " F. ^." 
We were allowed sixpence a week spending-money at Mr. 



58 MEMOIRS. 

Greene's, two cents, or a penny, being deducted for a bad 
mark. Sometimes I actually got a full week's income ; once 
I let it run on up to 25 cents, but this was forbidden, it not 
being considered advisable that the boys should accumulate 
fortunes. A great deal of my money went for cheap comic 
literature, which I carefully preserved. In those days there 
were Crockett's almanacs (now a great fund of folk-lore), 
and negro songs and stories were beginning to be popular. 
It is very commonly asserted that the first regular negro 
minstrel troupe appeared in 1842. This is quite an error. 
While I was at Mr. Greene's, in 1835, there came to Dedham 
a circus with as regularly-appointed a negro minstrel troupe 
of a dozen as I ever saw. I often beheld the pictures of them 
on the bill. Nor do I think that this was any novelty even 
then. The Crockett almanacs greatly stimulated my sense 
of American humour (they do indeed form collectively a 
very characteristic work), and this, with some similar read- 
ing, awoke in me a passion for wild Western life and frontier 
experiences, which was fully and strangely gratified in after 
years, but which would certainly have never happened had it 
not been for this boyish reading. 

For I beg the reader to observe that it is a very deeply- 
seated characteristic that whatever once takes root in my 
mind invariably grows. This comes from the great degree to 
which I have always gone over, reviewed, and reflected on, or 
nursed everything which ever once really interested me. And 
as I have thus far written, and shall probably conclude this 
work without referring to a note, the reader will have ample 
opportunity of observing how very strangely in all cases the 
phases of my life were predetermined long before by the 
literary education which I gave myself, aided very much by 
hereditary or other causes quite beyond my control. Now, as 
the object of a Life is to understand every cause which cre- 
ated it, and as mine was to a very unusual degree created by 
reading and reflecting, even in infancy, I beg the reader not 
to be impatient with me for describing so much in detail the 



EARLY LIFE. 59 

books which made my mind at different times. That is, I 
pray this much allowance and sympathy from possible read- 
ers and critics, that they will kindly not regard me as vain or 
thinking over-much of, or too much over, myself. For to 
set oneself forth as one really is requires deep investigation 
into every cause, and the depicting all early characteristics, 
and the man never lived who ever did this truly and accu- 
rately without much egoism, or what the ill-disposed may 
treat as such. And I promise the possible reader that when 
this subjective analysis shall be fairly disposed of, there will 
be no lack of mere incident or event of objective nature and 
more general interest. 

My first winter at Jamaica Plains Avas the terrible one of 
1835, during which I myself saw the thermometer at 50 de- 
grees Fahrenheit below zero, and there was a snow-bank in 
the play-ground from October till !May. The greatest care 
possible was taken of us boys to keep us warm and well, but 
we still suffered very much from chilblains. Water thrown 
into the air froze while falling. Still there were some happy 
lights and few shadows in it all. The boys skated or slid on 
beautiful Jamaica Pond, which was near the school. There 
was a general giving of sleds to us all ; mine broke to pieces 
at once. I never had luck with any plaything, never played 
ball or marbles, and hardly ever had even a top. Nor did I 
ever have much to do with any games, or even learn in later 
years to play cards, which was all a great pit}^ Sports should 
be as carefully looked to in early education as book-learning. 
I had also a pair of dear gazelle-skates given to me with the 
rest, but they also broke up on first trial, and I have never 
owned any since. Destiny was always against me in such 
matters. 

The boys built two large snow-houses, roofed in or arched 
over with hard snow. One was ingeniously and appropri- 
ately like an Eskimo hut, with a rather long winding passage 
leading into it. Of these I wTote in the spring, when the 
sun had begun to act, " one is almost annihilated, and of the 



60 



MEMOIRS. 



other not a vestage remains." I found the letter by chance 
many years later. 

There lived in Boston some friends of my mother's named 
Gay. In the family was an old lady over eighty, who was 
a wonderfully lively spirited person. She still sang, as I 
thought, very beautifully, to the lute, old songs such as 
"The merry days of good Queen Bess," and remembered 
the old Colonial time as if it were of yesterday. One day 
Mr. Gay came out and took me to his house, where I re- 
mained from Saturday until Monday ; during which time I 
found among the books, and very nearly read through, all 
the poems of Peter Pindar or Doctor Wolcott. Precious 
reading it was for a boy of eleven, yet I enjoyed it im- 
mensely. While there, I found in the earth in the garden 
an oval, dark-green porphyry pebble, which I, moved by a 
strange feeling, preserved for many years as an amulet. It 
is very curious that exactly such pebbles are found as fetishes 
all over the world, and the famous conjuring stone of the 
Voodoos, which I possess, is only an ordinary black flint 
pebble of the same shape. Negroes have travelled a thou- 
sand miles to hold it in their hands and make a wish, which, 
if uttered with/«i7/i, is always granted. Its possession alone 
entitles any one to the first rank as master in the mysteries 
of Voodoo sorcery. Truly I began early in the business ! I 
may here say that since I owned the Voodoo stone it has 
been held in several very famous and a few very beautiful 
hands. 

While I was at Mr. Greene's I wrote my first poem. I 
certainly exhibited no great precocity of lyrical genius in it, 
but the reader must remember that I was only a foolish little 
boy of ten or eleven at the time, and that I showed it to no 
one. It was as follows : 

" As a long-bearded Sultan, an infidel Turk, 
Who ne'er in his life had done any work. 
Rode along to the bath, he saw Hassan the black, 
With two monstrous water-skins high on his back. 



EARLY LIFE. 61 

" ' Ho, Hassan, thou afreet ! thou infidel dog ! 
Thou son of a Jewess and eater of hog ! 
This instant, this second, put down thy skin jugs. 
And for my sovereign pleasure remove both the plugs ! ' 

" The negro obeyed him, put both on the ground. 
And opened the skins and the water flew round ; 
The Sultan looked on till he laughed his fill ; 
Then went on to the bath, feeling heated and ill. 

" When arrived at the bath, * Is all ready ? ' he cries. 
' Indeed it is not, sire,' the bath-man replies ; 
* For to fetch the bath-water black Hassan has gone. 
And your highness can't have it till he shall return.' " 

In after years my friend, Professor E. H. Palmer, trans- 
lated this into Arabic, and promised me that it should be 
sung in the East. It is not much of a poem, even for a boy, 
but there is one touch trne to life in it — which is the cursing. 
This must have come to me by revelation ; and in after years 
in Cairo I never heard a native address another as ^^ Afrit I 
Ya-liinzeer — iva Yaliud — yin uldeen ah 9 " — " curse yonr re- 
ligion ! " — but I thought how marvellous it was that I, even 
in my infancy, had divined so vv^ell how they did it ! How- 
ever, now I come to think of it, I had the year before read 
Morier's "Haji-Baba" with great admiration, and I doubt 
not that it was the influence of that remarkable book which 
produced this beautiful result. In after years I met with a 
lady who was a daughter of Morier. Apropos of the look^ it 
reminds me that I specially recall my reviewing it mentally 
many times. 

I have review^ed my early life in quiet, old-fashioned, 
shaded Philadelphia and in rural New England so continu- 
ally and carefully all the time ever since it passed that I am 
sure its minutest detail on any day would now be accurately 
recalled at the least suggestion. As I shall almost certainly 
write this whole work without referring to a note or journal 
or other document, it will be seen that I remember the past 
pretty well. What is most remarkable in it all, if I can make 
myself intelligible, is that what between the deep and indelir 



62 MEMOIRS. 

ble impression made on my mind by hoohs^ and that of 
scenery and characters now passed away — the two being con- 
nected — it all seems to me now to be as it were yividly de- 
picted, coloured, or ivritten in my mind, like pages in an 
illuminated or illustrated romance. As some one has said 
that dreams are novels which we read when asleep, so by- 
gone memories, when continually revived and associated with 
the subtle and delicate influences of reading, really become 
fixed literature to us, glide into it, and are virtually turned 
to copy, which only awaits type. Thus a scene to one highly 
cultivated in art is really a picture, to a degree which few 
actually realise, though they may fancy they do, because to 
actually master this harmony requires so many years of study 
and thought that I very rarely meet with perfect instances of 
it. De Quincey and Coleridge are two of the best illustra- 
tions whom I can recall, while certain analytical character- 
sifters in modern novels seem the farthest remote from such 
genial naturalness. 

At the end of the first year my brother returned to Phila- 
delphia. I passed the summer at Dr. Stimson's, in Dedham, 
wandering about in the woods with my bow, fishing in the 
river, reading always whatever fate or a small circulating 
library provided — I remember that " The Devil on Two 
Sticks " and the " Narrative of Captain Boyle " were in it — 
and carving spoons and serpents from wood, which was a 
premonition of my later work in this line, and of my 
" Manual of Wood-Carving." 

At this time something took place which deeply impressed 
me. This was the two hundredth anniversary of the build- 
ing of the town of Dedham, which was celebrated with very 
great splendour : speeches, tents with pine-boughs, music- 
booths, ginger-beer, side-shows — in short, all the pomp and 
circumstance of a country fair allied to historic glory. I had 
made one or two rather fast and, I fear me, not over-reputa- 
ble acquaintances of my own age, with whom I enjoyed the 
festival to the utmost. Then I returned to school, and au- 



EARLY LIFE. 63 

tumn came, and then winter. At this time I felt fearfully 
lonely. I yearned for my mother with a longing beyond 
words, and was altogether home-sick. 

I was seated one Saturday afternoon, busily working in 
the drawing-class under a little old Englishman named Dr. 
Hunt, when there came the startling news that a gentleman 
had come to take me liome ! I could hardly believe my 
senses. I went down, and was presented to a man of about 
thirty, of extremely pleasant and attractive appearance, who 
told me that his name was Carlisle, that he was a friend 
of my father's, and that I was at once to return with 
him to Philadelphia. I wonder that I did not faint with 

joy. 

Mr. Carlisle was a man of very remarkable intelligence, 
kindness, and refinement. Nearly sixty years have passed 
since then, and yet the memory of the delightful impression 
which he made on me is as fresh as ever. My trunk was soon 
packed ; we were whirled away to Boston, and went to a ho- 
tel, he treating me altogether like a young gentleman and an 
equal. 

It had been the dream and hope and wild desire of my 
life to go to the Lion Theatre in Boston, where circus was 
combined with roaring maritime melodramas, of which I had 
beard heavenly accounts from a few of my schoolmates. And 
Mr. Carlisle took me there that evening, and I saw " Hyder 
Ali." Never, never in my life before did I dream that dra- 
matic art, poetry, and mimesis could attain to such ideal 
splendour. And then a sailor came on the stage and sang 
" Harry Bluff," and when he came to the last line— 

" And he died like a true Yankee sailor at last," 

amid thundering hurrahs, it seemed to me that romance could 
go no farther. I do not think that Mr. Carlisle had any knowl- 
edge of boys, certainly not of such a boy as I was, but I am 
sure that he must have been amply repaid for his kindness to 
me in my delight. And there were acrobatic performances. 



Q4, MEMOIRS. 

such as I had never seen in my life, and we returned to the 
hotel and a grand supper, and I was in heaven. 

The next morning Mr. Carlisle put into my hand, with 
great delicacy, such a sum as I had never before possessed, 
telling me that I " would need it for travelling expenses." 
All the while he drew me out on literature. On the Long 
Island Sound steamer he bade me notice a young gentleman 
(whom I was destined to know in after years), a man with 
curly hair and very foppish air, accompanied by a page " in 
an eru23tion of buttons," and told me that it was N. P. Willis. 
And so revelling in romance and travel, with mince-j)ie and 
turkey for my daily food, my pocket stuffed with money, in 
the most refined and elegant literary society (at least it was 
there on deck), I came to Philadelphia. I may here say that 
the memory of Mr. Carlisle has made me through all my life 
kinder to boys than I might otherwise have been ; and if, as a 
teacher, I have been popular among them, it was to a great 
degree due to his influence. For, as will appear in many pas- 
sages in this book, I have to a strange degree the habit of 
thinking over marked past experiences, and drawing from 
them precedents by which to guide my conduct; hence it has 
often happened that a single incident has shown itself in hun- 
dreds of others, as a star is reflected in countless pools. 



II. 

BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 

1837-1845. 

Return to Philadelphia at twelve years of age — Early discipline — School 
at Mr. C. Walker's — B. P. Hunt — My first reading of Rabelais — 
Mr. Robert Stewart — Hurlbut's school — Boyish persecution — Much 
strange reading — Francois Villon — Early studies in philosophy — 
Transcendentalism and its influence — Spanish — School of E. C. 
Wines — The French teacher — Long illness — The intelligent horse — 
Princeton University professors — Albert Dodd and James Alexander 
— College life — Theology — Rural scenes — Reading — My first essays 
— The Freshman rebellion — Smoking — George H. Boker — Jacob 
Behnien or Bohme — Stonington — Captain Nat Palmer and Commo- 
dore Vanderbilt — My graduation. 

How liappy I was again to see my mother and father and 
Henry ! And then came other joys. My father had taken a 
very nice house in Walnut Street, in the best quarter of the 
city, below Thirteenth Street, and this was a source of pleas- 
ure, as was also a barrel of apples in the cellar, to which I 
had free access. They had been doled out to us very spar- 
ingly at school, and I never shall forget the delight with 
which I one day in December at Jamaica Plain discovered a 
frozen apple on a tree ! Then there was the charm of being 
in a great city, and familiar old scenes, and the freedom from 
bad marks, and being ruled into bounds, and sent to bed at 
early hours. There is, in certain cases, a degree of moral 
restraint and discipline which is often carried much too far, 
especially where boys are brought up with a view to pushing 
themselves in the world. I was sixteen years of age and six 
feet high before I was allowed to leave off short jackets, go to 
a theatrCj or travel alone, all of which was more iujurious to 



QQ MEMOIRS. 

me, I believe, than ordinary youthful dissipation would have 
been, especially in America. Yet, while thus repressed, I 
was being continually referred by all grown-up friends to en- 
terprising youth of my own age, who were making a living in 
bankers' or conveyancers' offices, &c., and acting " like men." 
The result really being that I was completely convinced that 
I was a person of feeble and inferior capacity as regarded all 
that was worth doing or knowing in life, though Heaven 
knows my very delicate health and long illnesses might of 
themselves have excused all my failings. The vast majority 
of Americans, however kind and generous they may be in 
other respects, are absolutely without mercy or common-sense 
as regards the not succeeding in life or making money. Such, 
at least, was my experience, and bitter it was. Elders often 
forget that even obedience, civility, and morality in youth are 
luxuries which must be paid for like all other extravagances 
at a high price, especially in children of feeble constitution. 
The dear boy grows up " as good as pie," and, being pious, 
" does not know one card from another," nor one human be- 
ing from another. You make of him a fool, and then call 
him one — I mean, what you regard as a fool. I am not at 
all sure that one or two cruises in a slaver (there were plenty 
of them sailing out of New York in those days) would not 
have done me far more good of a certain kind than all the 
education I had till I left college in America. I am not here 
complaining, as most weak men do, as if they were specially 
victims to a wretched fate and a might-have-been-better. 
The vast majority of boys have not better homes or educa- 
tion, kinder parents, or advantages greater than mine were. 
But as I do not recall my boyhood's days or my youth till I 
left college with that joyoiisness which I find in other men 
without exception, and as, in fact, there always seems as if a 
cloud were over it all, while from below there was a low con- 
tinual murmur as of a patient soul in pain, I feel that there 
was something wrong in it all, as there indeed was — the 
wrong of taking all the starcli out of a shirt, and then won- 



BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 67 

dering that it was not stiff. But I must say, at the same 
time, that this free expansion is not required by the vast 
majority of boys, who are only far too ready and able to 
spread themselves into "life" without any aid whatever. 
What is for one meat may be for another poison, and mine 
was a very exceptional case, which required very peculiar 
treatment. 

My father had sold out his business in 1832 to Mr. Charles 
S. Boker, and since then been principally engaged in real 
estate and stock speculation. When I returned, he had 
bought a large property between Chestnut Market and Third 
Streets, on which was a hotel called Congress Hall, with which 
there were connected many historical associations, for most 
of the noted men who for many years visited Philadelphia 
had lived in it. With it were stables and other buildings, 
covering a great deal of ground in the busiest portion of the 
city, but still not in its condition very profitable. Then, 
again, he purchased the old Arch Street prison, a vast 
gloomy pile, like four dead walls, a building nearly 400 feet 
square. It was empty, and I went over it and into the cells 
many times. I remember thinking of the misery and degra- 
dation of those who had been confined there. The disci- 
pline had been bad enough, for the prisoners had been allowed 
to herd freely together. My father tore it down, and built a 
block of handsome dwelling-houses on its site. As the trot- 
toir or side-walk was narrow, he, at a considerable loss to 
himself, made a present to the city of a strip of land which 
left a wide pavement. I say " at a loss," for had the houses 
been deeper they would have sold for much more. The City 
Council graciously accepted the gift, with the special condi- 
tion that my father should pay all the expenses of the trans- 
fer ! From which I learned the lesson that in this life a man 
is quite as liable to suffer from doing good as doing evil, un- 
less he employs just as much foresight or caution in the doing 
thereof. Some of the most deeply regretted acts of my life, 
which have caused me most sincere and oft-renewed repent- 



68 



MEMOIRS. 



ance, were altogether and perfectly acts of generosity and 
goodness. The simple truth of which is that a gush^ no mat- 
ter how sweet and pure the water may be, generally displaces 
something. Many more buildings did my father buy and sell, 
but committed withal the very serious error of never buying 
a house as a permanent home or a country place, which he 
might have easily done, and even to great profit, which error 
in the long-run caused us all great inconvenience, and much 
of that shifting from place to place which is very bad for a 
growing family. The humblest man in such case in a house 
of his own has certain great advantages over even a million- 
aire in lodgings. 

Mr. S. 0. AValker had given over his school to a younger 
brother named Joseph, but it was still kept in the old house 
in Eighth Street, where also I had taken my lessons in the 
rudiments of Transcendentalism from the Orphic Alcott. It 
was now a fairly good school as things went in those days, 
with the same lectures in Natural Philosophy and Chemistry 
— the same mild doses of French and Latin. The chief 
assistant was E. Otis Kimball, subsequently a professor of 
astronomy, a very gentlemanly and capable instructor, of a 
much higher type than any assistant-teacher whom I had 
ever before met. Under him I read Voltaire's " Charles the 
Twelfth." George H. Boker, who was one year older than I, 
and the son of my father's old partner, went to this school. 
I do not remember that for the first year or eighteen months 
after my return to Philadelphia there was any incident of 
note in my life, or that I read anything unless it was Shake- 
speare, and reviews which much influenced me. However, I 
was very wisely allowed to attend a gymnasium, kept by a 
man named Hudson. Here there was a sporting tone, much 
pistol-shooting at a mark, boxing and fencing, prints of 
prize-fighters on the wall, and cuts from Life in Londori^ 
with copious cigar-smoke. It was a wholesome, healthy 
place for me. Unfortunately, I could not afford the shoot- 
ing, boxing, &c., but I profited somewhat by it, both morally 



BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 69 

and physically. At this critical period, or a little later, a few 
pounds a year judiciously invested in sport and " dissipation " 
would have changed the whole current of my life, probably 
much for the better, and it would certainly have spared my 
poor father the conviction, which he had almost to his death, 
that I was a sad and mortifying failure or exception which 
had not paid its investment ; for which opinion he was in no 
wise to blame, it being also that of all his business acquaint- 
ances, many of whose sons, it was true, went utterly to the 
devil, but then it was in the ancient intelligible, common- 
sensible, usual paths of gambling, horsing, stock-brokering, 
selling short, or ruining all their relatives by speculating 
with their money. However, there was also the — rather for- 
lorn — hope ahead that I would do something in a profession. 

The school went on, Mr. Walker studying law meantime 
till he had passed his examination, when it was transferred 
to Mr. B. P. Hunt. With this man, who became and re- 
mained my intimate friend till his death, thirty years after, 
came the first faint intimation of what was destined to be 
the most critical, the most singular, and by far the most im- 
portant period of my life. 

Mr. Hunt was, as he himself declared to me in after years, 
not at all fitted to be a schoolmaster. He lacked the minor 
or petty earnestness of character, and even the training or 
preparation, necessary for such work. On the other hand, 
he had read a great deal in a desultory way ; he was very 
fond of all kinds of easy literature ; and when he found that 
any boy understood the subject, he would talk with that boy 
about whatever he had been reading. Yet there was some- 
thing real and stimulative in him, for there never was a man 
in Philadelphia who kept school for so short a time and with 
so few pupils who had among them so many who in after life 
became more or less celebrated. For he certainly made all 
of us who were above idiocy think and live in thought above 
the ordinary range of school-boy life. Thus I can recall 
these two out of many incidents : — 



70 



MEMOIRS. 



Finding me one day at an old book-stand, he explained 
to me Alduses, and Elzevirs, and bibliography, showing me 
several specimens, all of which I remembered. 

I had read Watson's " Annals of Philadelphia." [By the 
way, I knew the daughter of the author.] There Avas an 
allusion in it to Cornelius Agrippa, and Mr. Hunt explained 
and dilated on this great sorcerer to me till I became half 
crazy to read the " Occult Philosophy," which I did at a 
roaring rate two years later. 

One day I saw Mr. Hunt and Mr. Kendall chuckling to- 
gether over a book. I divined a secret. Now, I was a very 
honourable boy, and never pried into secrets, but where a 
quaint old book was concerned I had no more conscience 
than a pirate. And seeing Mr. Hunt put the book into his 
desk, I abode my time till he had gone forth, when I raised 
the lid, and . . . 

Merciful angels and benevolent fairies ! it was Urquhart's 
translation of Eabelais ! One short spell I read, no more ; 
but it raised a devil which has never since been laid. Ear 
hath not heard, it hath not entered into the heart of man to 
conceive, what I felt as I realised, like a young giant just 
awakened, that there was in me a stupendous mental 
strength to grasp and understand that magnificent mixture 
of ribaldry and learning, fun and wisdom, deviltry and divini- 
ty. In a few pages' time I knew what it all meant, and that 
I was gifted to understand it. I rejolaced the book ; nor did 
I read it again for years, but from that hour I was never 
quite the same person. The next day I saw Callot's " Temp- 
tation of St. Anthony " for the first time in a shop- window, 
and felt with joy and pride that I understood it out of 
Rabelais. Two young gentlemen — lawyers apparently — by 
my side thought it was crazy and silly. To me it was more 
like an apocalypse. 

I am speaking plain truth when I say that that one quar- 
ter of an hour's reading of Rabelais — standing up — was to 
me as the light which flashed upon Saul journeying to 



BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 71 

Damascus. It seems to me now as if it were the great event 
of my life. It came to such a pass in after years that I could 
have identified any line in the Chronicle of Gargantua, and 
I also was the suggester, father, and founder in London of 
the Eabelais Club, in which Avere many of the best minds of 
the time, but beyond it all and brighter than all was that 
first revelation. 

It should be remembered that I had already perused Sterne, 
much of Swift, and far more comic and satiric literature than 
is known to boys, and, what is far more remarkable, had thor- 
oughly taken it all into my cor corduwi by much repetition 
and reflection. 

Mr. Hunt in time put me up to a great deal of very val- 
uable or curious helletristic fair-lettered or black-lettered 
reading, far beyond my years, though not beyond my intelli- 
gence and love. We had been accustomed to pass to our 
back-gate of the school through Blackberry Alley — 

" Blackberry Alley, now Duponceau Street, 
A rose by any name will smell as sweet " — 

which was tenanted principally by social evils. He removed 
to the corner of Seventh and Chestnut Streets. Under our 
schoolroom there was a gambling den. I am not aware that 
these surroundings had any effect whatever upon the pupils. 
Among the pupils in Seventh Street was one named Emile 
Tourtelot. We called him Oatmeal Turtledove. I had an- 
other friend who was newly come from Connecticut. His 
uncle kept a hotel and often gave him Havanna cigars. We 
often took long walks together out of town and smoked 
them. He taught me the song — 

" On Springfield mountains there did dwell," 

with much more quaint rural New England lore. 

About this time my grandfather Leland died. I wept 
sadly on hearing it. My father, who went to Holliston to 
attend the funeral, brought me back a fine collection of 



72 MEMOIRS. 

Indian stone relics and old American silver coins, for he had 
been in his way an antiquarian. Bon sang ne pent mentir. 
I had also the certificate of some Society or Order of Eevo- 
hitionary soldiers to which he had belonged. One of his 
brothers had, as an officer, a membership of the hereditary 
Order of the Cincinnati. This passed to another branch of 
the family. 

For many years the principal regular visitor at our house 
was Mr. Kobert Stewart, a gentleman of good family and 
excellent education, who had during the wars with Napoleon 
made an adventurous voyage to France, and subsequently 
passed most of his life as Consul or diplomatic agent in Cuba. 
He had brought with him from Cuba a black Ebo-African 
slave named Juan. As the latter seemed to be discontented 
in Philadelphia, Mr. Stewart, who was kindness itself, offered 
to send him back freed to Cuba or Africa, and told him he 
might buy a modest outfit of clothing, such as suited his 
condition. The negro went to a first-class tailor and ordered 
splendid clothes, which were sent back, of course. The vin- 
dictive Ebo was so angry at this, that one summer afternoon, 
while Mr. Stewart slept, the former fell on him with an axe 
and knife, mangled his head horribly, cut the cords of his 
hand, &c., and thought he had killed him. But hearing his 
victim groan, he was returning, when he met another servant, 
who said, *' Juan, where are you going ? " He replied, " Me 
begin to kill Mars' Stewart — now me go back finish him ! " 
He was, of course, promptly arrested. Mr. Stewart recovered, 
but was always blind of one eye, and his right hand was 
almost useless. Mr. Stewart had in his diplomatic capacity 
seen many of the pirates who abounded on the Spanish Main 
in those days. He was an admirable raconteur^ abounding 
in reminiscences. His son "William inherited from an uncle 
a Cuban estate worth millions of dollars, and lived many 
years in Paris. He was a great patron of (especially Span- 
ish) art. 

So I passed on to my fourteenth year, which was des- 



BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 73 

tined to be the beginning of the most critical period of my 
life. My illnesses had increased in number and severity, and 
I had shot up into a very tall weak youth. Mr. Hunt gave 
up teaching, and became editor of LittelVs Magazine. I was 
sent to the school of Mr. Hurlbut — as I believe it was then 
spelled, but I may be wrong. He had been a Unitarian 
clergyman, but was an ungenial, formal, rather harsh man — 
the very opposite of Mr. Hunt. My schoolmates soon found 
that though so tall, I was physically very weak, and many of 
them continually bullied and anno3^ed me. Once I was driven 
into a formal stand-up fight with one younger by a year, but 
much stronger. I did my best, but was beaten. I offered to 
fight him then in Indian fashion with a hug, but this he 
scornfully declined. After this he never met me without 
insulting me, for he had a base nature, as his after-life proved. 
These humiliations had a bad effect upon me, for I was 
proud and nervous, and, like many such boys, often very 
foolish. 

But I had a few very good friends. Among these was 
Charles Macalester. One day when I had been bullied shame- 
fully by the knot of boys who always treated me badly, he 
ran after me up Walnut Street, and, almost with tears in his 
eyes, assured me of his sympathy. There were two other 
intimates. George Patrullo, of Spanish parentage, and Eich- 
ard Seldener, son of the Swedish Consul. They read a great 
deal. One day it chanced that Seldener had in his bosom a 
very large old-fashioned flint-lock horse-pistol loaded with 
shot. By him and me stood Patrullo and William Henry 
Hurlbut, who has since become a very well-known character. 
Thinking that Seldener's pistol was unloaded, Patrullo, to 
frighten young Hurlbut, pulled the weapon suddenly from 
Seldener's breast, put it between Hurlbut's eyes and fired. 
The latter naturally started to one side, so it happened that 
he only received one shot in his ear. The charge went into 
the wall, where it made a mark like a bullet's, which was long 
visible. George Patrullo was drowned not long after while 



74 MEMOIRS. 

swimming in the Schuylkill river, and Richard Seldener 
perished on an Atlantic steamer, which was never heard of. 

On the other hand, something took place which cast a 
marvellous light into this darkened life of mine. For one 
day my father bought and presented to me a share in the 
Philadelphia Library. This was a collection which even 
then consisted of more than G0,000 well-chosen volumes. 
And then began such a life of reading as was, I sincerely 
believe, unusual in such youth. My first book was "Arthur 
of Little Britaine," which I finished in a week ; then " Newes 
from New Englande, 1636," and the " Historic of Clodoal- 
dus." Before long I discovered that there were in the Lo- 
ganian section of the library several hundred volumes of 
occult philosophy, a collection once formed by an artist 
named Cox, and of these I really read nearly every one. 
Cornelius Agrippa and Barret's " Magus," Paracelsus, the 
black-letter edition of Reginald Scot, Glanville, and Gaffarel, 
Trithemius, Baptista Porta, and God knows how many Rosi- 
crucian writers became familiar to me. Once when I had 
only twenty-five cents I gave it for a copy of " Waters of the 
East " by Eugenius Philalethes, or Thomas Vaughan. 

All of this led me to the Mystics and Quietists. I read Dr. 
Boardman's " History of Quakerism," which taught me that 
Fox grew out of Behmen ; and I picked up one day Poiret's 
French work on the Mystics, which was quite a handbook or 
guide to the whole literature. But these books were but a 
small part of what I read ; for at one time, taking another 
turn towards old English, I went completely through Chaucer 
and Gower, both in black letter, the collections of Ritson, 
Weber, Ellis, and I know not how many more of mediaeval 
ballads and romances, and very thoroughly and earnestly in- 
deed Warton's " History of English Poetry." Then I read Sis- 
mondi's " Literature of Southern Europe " and Longfellow's 
" Poets and Poetry of Europe," which set me to work on 
Raynouard and other collections of Proven9al poetry, in the 
knowledge of which I made some progress, and also St. 



BOYHOOD AND Y,OUTH. 75 

Pelaye's, Le Grand's, Costello's, and other books on the 
Trouveurs. I translated into rhyme and sent to a maga- 
zine, of which I in after years became editor, one or two la'is^ 
which were rejected, I think unwisely, for they were by no 
means bad. Then I had a fancy for Miscellanea, and read 
the works of D'Israeli the elder and Burton's "Anatomy," 

One day I made a startling discovery, for I took at a 
venture from the library the black-letter first edition of the 
poems of Fran9ois Villon. I was then fifteen years old. 
Never shall I forget the feeling, which Heine compares to 
the unexpected finding of a shaft of gold in a gloomy mine, 
which shot through me as I read for the first time these bal- 
lades. Now-a-days people are trained to them through sec- 
ond-hand sentiment. Villon has become — Heaven bless the 
mark \—fasMonadle! and esthetic. I got at him "straight" 
out of black-letter reading in boyhood as a find of my own, 
and it was many, many years ere I ever met with a single soul 
who had heard of him. I at once translated the " Song of the 
Ladies of the Olden Time " ; and I knew what hon iec meant, 
which is more than one of Villon's great modern translators 
has done ! Also heauhniere, which is not helmet-maker, as 
another supposes. 

I went further in this field than I have room to describe. 
I even read the rococo-sweet poems of Joachim du Bellay. 
In this 3^ear my father gave me " The Doctor," by Robert 
Southey, a work which I read and re-read assiduously for 
many years, and was guided by it to a vast amount of odd 
reading, Philemon Holland's translation of Pliny being one 
of the books. This induced me to read all of Southey's 
poems, which I did, not from the library, but from a book- 
store, where I had free run and borrowing privileges, as I 
well might, since my father lost £4,000 by its owner. 

While at Mr. Greene's school I had given me Alsopp's 
" Life and Letters of Coleridge," which I read through many 
times ; then in my thirteenth year, in Philadelphia, I read 
with great love Charles Lamb's works and most of the works 



76 .MEMOIRS. 

of Coleridge. Mr. Alcott had read Wordsworth into us in 
illimitable quantities, so that I soon had a fair all-round 
knowledge of the Lakers, whom I dearly loved. Now there 
was a certain soupQon of Mysticism or Transcendentalism 
and Pantheism in Coleridge, and even in Wordsworth, which 
my love of rocks and rivers and fairy lore easily enabled me 
to detect by sympathy. 

But all of this was but a mere preparation for and fore- 
shadowing of a great mental development and very preco- 
cious culture which was rapidly approaching. I now speak 
of what happened to me from 1838 to 1840, principally in 
the latter year. If I use extravagant, vain words, I beg the 
reader to pardon me. Perhaps this will never be published, 
therefore sit verbo venia ! 

I had become deeply interested in the new and bold de- 
velopment which was then manifesting itself in the Unitarian 
Church. Channing, whom I often heard preach, had some- 
thing in common with the Quietists ; Mr. Furness was really 
a thinker " out of bounds," while in reality as gentle and 
purely Christian as could be. There was something new in 
the air, and -this Something I, in an antiquated form, had 
actually preceded. It was really only a reclianffe of the Neo- 
Platonism which lay at the bottom of Porphyry, Proclus, 
Psellus, Jamblichus, with all of whom I was fairly well ac- 
quainted. Should any one doubt this, I can assure him that 
I still possess a full copy of the " Poemander " or " Piman- 
der " of Hermes Trismegistus, made by me in my sixteenth 
year, which most assuredly no mortal could ever have under- 
stood or made, or cared to make, if he had not read the Neo- 
Platonists ; for Marsilius Ficinus himself regarded this work 
as a pendant to them, and published it as such. Which work 
I declared was not a Christian Platonic forgery, but based 
on old Egyptian works, as has since been well-nigh proved 
from recent discoveries. (I think it was Dr. Garnett 
who, hearing me once declare in the British Museum that 
I believed Hermes was based on an ancient Egyptian 



BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 77 

text, sent for a French work in which the same view was 
advanced.) 

The ignorance, narrow-mindedness, and oduun tlieologicum 
which prevailed in America until 1840 was worse than that 
in Europe under the Church in the Middle Ages, for even in 
the latter there had been an Agobard and an Abelard, Knight- 
Templar agnostics, and illuminati of different kinds. The 
Unitarians, who believed firmly in every point of Christianity, 
and that man was saved by Jesus, and would be damned if 
he did not put faith in him as the Son of God, were regarded 
literally and truly by everybody as no better than infidels be- 
cause they believed that Christ was sent by God, and that 
Three could not be One. Every sect, with rare exceptions, 
preached, especially the Presbyterians, that the vast majority 
even of Christians would be damned, thereby giving to the 
devil that far greater power than God against which Bishop 
Agobard had protested. As for a freethinker or infidel, he 
was pointed at in the streets ; and if a man had even seen a 
" Deist," he spoke of it as if he had beheld a murderer. 
Against all this some few were beginning to revolt. 

There came a rumour that there was something springing 
up in Boston called Transcendentalism. Nobody knew what 
it was, but it was dreamy, mystical, crazy, and infideleterious 
to religion. Firstly, it was connected with Thomas Carlyle 
and Ealph Waldo Emerson, and finally with everything Ger- 
man. The new school of liberal Unitarians favoured it. I 
had a quick intuition that here was something for me to work 
at. I bought Carlyle's Sartor Besartus, first edition, and 
read it through forty times ere I left college, of which I " kept 
count." 

My record here as regards some books may run a little 
ahead ; but either before I went to college or during my first 
year there (almost all before or by 1840-'41), I had read Car- 
lyle's " Miscellanies " thoroughly, Emerson's " Essays," a 
translation of Kant's " Critique of Pure Keason," the first 
half of it many times ; Dugald Stewart's works, something 



78 MEMOIRS. 

of Reid, Locke, and Hobbes's " Leviathan " ; had bought and 
read French versions of Schelling's " Transcendental Ideal- , 
ism " and Fichte's fascinating " Destiny of Man " ; studied a 
small handbook of German philosophy ; the works of Cam- 
panella and Vanini (Bruno much later, for his works were 
then exceeding rare. I now have Weber's edition), and also, 
with intense relish and great profit, an old English version of 
Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. In which last work 
I had the real key and clue to all German philosophy and 
Rationalism, as I in time found out. I must here modestly 
mention that I had, to a degree which I honestly believe sel- 
dom occurs, the art of rajjid yet of carefully-observant read- 
ing. George Boker once, quite unknown to me, gave me 
something to read, watched my eyes as I went from line to 
line, timed me by watch, and finally examined me on what I 
had read. He published the incident long after, said he had 
repeated it more than once a mon insu, and that it was re- 
markable. 

Such a dual life as I at this time led it has seldom entered 
into the head of man to imagine. I was, on the one hand, a 
school-boy in a jacket, leading a humiliated life among my 
kind, all because I was sickly and weak ; while, on the other 
hand, utterly alone and without a living soul to whom I could 
exchange an idea, I was mastering rapidly and boldly that 
which was then in reality the tremendous problem of the age. 
I can now see that, as regards its real antique bases, I was far 
more deeply read and better grounded than were even its most 
advanced leaders in Anglo-Saxony. For I soon detected in 
Carlyle, and much more in Emerson, a very slender knowl- 
edge of that stupendous and marvellous ancient Mysticism 
wiiich sent its soul in burning faith and power to the depth 
of " the downward-borne elements of God," as Hermes called 
them. I missed even the rapt faith of such a weak writer as 
Sir Kenelm Digby, much more Zoroaster ! Vigourous and 
clever and bold writers they were — Carlyle was far beyond me 
in literary art — but true Pantheists they were 7iot. And they 



BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. ^g 

were men of great genius, issuing essays to the age on po^Du- 
lar, or political, or " literary " topics ; but pJiilosoj^hers tliey 
most assuredly were not, nor men tremendous in spiritual 
truth. And yet it was precisely as pMIosophers and thauma- 
turgists and revealers of occulta that they posed — especially 
Emerson. And they dabbled or trifled with free thought and 
" immorality," crying Goethe up as the Light of Lights, while 
all their inner souls were bound in the most Puritanical and 
petty goody-goodyism. Though there were traces of grim 
Scotch humour in Oarlyle, my patron saint and master, Eabe- 
lais, or aught like him, had no credit with them. 

They paddled in Pantheism, but as regards it, both lacked 
the stupendous faith and inspiration of the old adepti, who 
flung their whole souls into God ; and yet they sneered at 
Materialism and Science. 

I did not then see all of this so clearly as I now do, but I 
very soon found that, as in after years it was said that Comte- 
ism was Catholicism without Christianity, so the Carlyle- 
Emersonian Transcendentalism was Mysticism without mys- 
tery. Nor did I reflect that it was a calling peojole from the 
nightmared slumber of frozen orthodoxy or bigotry to come 
and see a marvellous new thing. And when they came, they 
found out that this marvellous thing was that they had been 
awakened, "only that and nothing more"; and that was the 
great need of the time, and worth more than any magic or 
theosophy. But I had expected, in simple ignorant faith, that 
the sacred mysteries of some marvellous cabala would be re- 
vealed, and not finding what I wanted (though indeed I dis- 
covered much that was worldly new to me), I returned to the 
good old ghost-haunted paths trodden by my ancestors, to 
dryads and elves and voices from the stars, and the arclimus 
formed by the astral spirit (not the modern Blavatsky affair, 
by-the-bye), which entyped all things . . . and so went elv- 
ing and dreaming on 'mid ruins old. 

Be it observed that all this time I really did not know 
what I knew. Boys are greatly influenced by their sur- 



80 



MEMOIRS. 



roundings, and in those days every one about me never spoke 
of Transcendentalism or " Germanism," or even " bookisli- 
ness," without a sneer. I was borne by a mysterious inner 
impulse which I could not resist into this terrible whirlpool 
of Mles-lettres, occulta, facetiae, and philosophy ; but I had, 
God knows, little cause for pride that I read so much, for it 
was on every hand in some way turned against me. If it 
had only been reading like that of other human beings, it 
might have been endured ; but I was always seen coming and 
going with parchment-bound tomes. Once I implored my 
father, when I was thirteen or fourteen, to let me buy a cer- 
tain book, which he did. This work, which was as dear to 
me as a new doll to a girl for a long time, was the Reducto- 
rium or moralisation of the whole Bible by Petrus Berchorius, 
black-letter, folio, Basle, 1511. It was from the library of a 
great and honest scholar, and, as the catalogue stated, " con- 
tained MS. notes on the margin by Melanchthon." 

Promising,' this, for an American youth who was expected 
to go into business or study a profession ! 

While at Hurlbut's school I took lessons in Spanish. 
There was a Spanish boy from Malaga, a kind of half -serv- 
ant, \-\2i\i-proUge in a family near us, with whom I practised 
speaking the language, and also had some opportunity with 
a few Cubans who visited our family. One of them had been 
a governor-general. He was a Gallician by birth, but I did 
not know this, and innocently asked him one day if los Gal- 
legos no son los Iiiaiideses d'^Espana ? — if the Gallicians were 
not the Irish of Spain — which drew a grave caution from my 
brother, who knew better than I how the land lay. I really 
attained some skill in Spanish, albeit to this day " Don Quix- 
ote " demands from me a great deal of dictionary. But, as I 
said before, I learn languages with incrediUe difficulty, a fact 
which I cannot reconcile with the extreme interest which I 
take in philology and linguistics, and the discoveries which 
I have made ; as, for instance, that of Shelta in England, or 
my labours in jargons, such as Pidgin-English, Slang, and 



BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 81 

Eomany. But, as the reader lias probably perceived, I was a 
boy with an inherited good constitution only from the pater- 
nal side, and a not very robust one from my mother, while 
my mind, weakened by long illness, had been strangely stimu- 
lated by many disorders, nervous fevers being frequent among 
them. In those days I was, as my mother said, almost 
brought up on calomel — and she might have added quinine. 
The result of so much nervousness, excessive stimulating by 
medicine, and rapid growth was a too great susceptibility to 
poetry, humour, art, and all that was romantic, quaint, and 
mysterious, while I found it very hard to master any really 
dry subject. What would have set me all right would have 
been careful physical culture, boxing, so as to protect me 
from my school persecutors, and amusement in a healthy 
sense, of which I had almost none whatever. 

Hurlbut's became at last simply intolerable, and my 
parents, finding out in some way that I was worse for being 
there, removed me to a far better school kept by E. 0. 
Wines, who had written books on education, and attained 
some fame thereby. This was in 1839-'40, and I was there 
to be prepared for college. We were soon introduced to an 
old French gentleman, who was to teach us, and who asked 
the other boys what French works they had read. Some 
had gone through Telhnaque^ or Paul et Virginie^ Florian^ 
etcetera. The good-goody nature of such reading awoke in 
me my sense of humour. When it came to my turn, and I 
was asked, I replied, "Z« Piicelle cV Orleans and Dictiomiaire 
Pliilosoijliique of Voltaire, the Confessions of Rousseau, the 
Poems of Villon, Charles d"* Orleans, Clotilde de Surville, and 
more or less of Heivetius, D'Holbach, and Condillac." Here 
the professor, feeling himself quizzed, cast forth his hands as 
in disgust and horror, and cried, ''^Assez ! assez ! Unhappy 
boy, you have raked through the library of the devil down to 
the dregs ! " Nor was I " selling " him, for I certainly had 
read the works, as the records of the Philadelphia Library 
can in a great measure prove, and did not speak by hearsay. 



82 MEMOIRS. 

I had at this time several severe long attacks of illness 
with much pain, which I always bore well, as a matter of 
course or habit. But rather oddly, while in the midst of my 
Transcendentalism, and reading every scrap of everything 
about Germany which I could get, and metaphysics, and 
study — I was very far gone then, and used to go home from 
school and light a pipe with a long wooden stem, and study 
the beloved " Critic of Pure Eeason " or Carlyle's Miscella- 
nies, having discovered that smoking was absolutely necessary 
in such reading — [De Quincey required a quart of laudanum 
to enable him to enjoy German metaphysics] — there came a 
strange gleam of worldly dissipation, of which I never think 
without pleasure. I had passed one summer vacation on a 
farm near Philadelphia, where I learned something in wood- 
ranging about wild herbs and catching land-tortoises and 
" coon-hunting," and had been allowed to hire and ride a 
horse. 

I did not know it, but this horse had thrown over his 
head everybody who had ever mounted him. He was a per- 
fect devil, but also a perfect gentleman. He soon took my 
measure, and resolved to treat me kindly as a protege. When 
we both wanted a gallop, he made such time as nobody be- 
fore had dreamed was in him ; when he was lazy, he only 
had to turn his head and look at me, and 1 knew what that 
meant and conformed unto him. He had a queer fancy at 
times to quietly steal up and put his hoof on my foot so as to 
hurt me, and then there was an impish laugh in his eye. 
For he laughed at me, and I knew it. There is really such 
a thing as a horse-laugh. One day we passed through a 
drove of sheep, and he did not like it — no horse does. After 
a while I wanted to go by a certain road, but he refused 
sternly to take it. I found soon after that if I had done so 
we must have met the sheep again. He had, in fact, under- 
stood the route far better than I. I once got a mile out of 
him in three minutes — more or less; but he had seen me 
look at my watch, and knew that I wanted to see what he 



BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 83 

could do. He never did it again. I may have be'en mis- 
taken here, but it was my impression at the time. Perhaps 
if I had gone on much longer in intimacy with him I might 
have profited mentally by it, and acquired what Americans 
call " horse-sense," of which I had some need. It is the sixth 
— or the first — sense of all Y^ankees and Scotchmen. When 
I returned to the city I w^as allowed to hire a horse for a few 
times from a livery stable, and went out riding with a friend. 
This friend was a rather precociously dissipated youth, and 
with him I had actually now and then — very rarely — a glass 
at a bar and oysters. He soon left me for wilder associates, 
and I relapsed into my old sober habits. Strange as it may 
seem, I believe that I was really on the brink of becoming 
like other boys. But it all faded away. Now it became im- 
perative that I should study in earnest. I used to rise at 
three or four in the morninsf. What with hard work and 
great fear of not passing my matriculation, I contrived to 
get up so much Latin, Greek, and mathematics, that Mr. 
Wines thought I might attempt it, and so one fine summer 
day my father went with me to Princeton. I was in a fear- 
ful a^ate of nervous anxiety. 

COLLEGE LIFE. 

PRINCETON. 

We went to Princeton, where I presented my letters of 
introduction, passed a by no means severe examination for 
the Freshman's class, was very courteously received by the 
professors to whom I was commended, and, to my inexpressi- 
ble delight, found myself a college student. Rooms were 
secured for me at a Mrs. Burroughs^ opposite N"assau Hall ; 
the adjoining apartment was occupied by Mr. Craig Biddle, 
now a judge. George H. Boker was then at the end of his 
Sophomore year, the term having but a few days to run. He 
had rooms in college and lived in unexampled style, having 
actually a carpet on his floor and superior furniture, also a 



g^ MEMOIRS. 

good collection of books, chiefly standard English poets. He 
at once took me in hand and gave me a character. 

Princeton College was entirely in the hands of the strict- 
est of " Old School " Presbyterian theologians. Piety and 
mathematics rated extravagantly high in the course. The 
latter study was literally reckoned in the grades as being of 
more account than all the rest collectively. Thus, as eventu- 
ally happened to me, a student might excel in Latin, English, 
and Natural Philosophy— in fact, in almost everything, good 
conduct included — and yet be the last in the class if he neg- 
lected mathematics. There was no teaching of Prench, be- 
cause, as was naively said, students might read the irreligious 
works extant in that language, and of course no other modern 
language ; as for German, one would as soon have proposed 
to raise the devil there as a class in it. If there had been an 
optional course, as at Cambridge, Massachusetts, by which 
German was accepted in lieu of mathematics, I should proba- 
bly have taken the first honour, instead of the last. And 
yet, with a little more Latin, I was really qualified, on the 
day when I matriculated at Princeton, to have passed for a 
Doctor of Philosophy in Heidelberg, as I subsequently accu- 
rately ascertained. 

There were three or four men of great ability in the Eac- 
ulty of the University. One of these was Professor Joseph 
Henry, in those days the first natural philosopher and lecturer 
on science in America. I had the fortune in time to become 
quite a special protege of his. Another was Professor James 
Alexander, who taught Latin, rhetoric, and mental philoso- 
phy. He was so clear-headed and liberally learned, that T 
always felt sure that he must at heart have been far beyond 
the bounds of Old School theology, but he had an iron 
Eoman-like sternness of glance which quite suited a Cove- 
nanter. The most remarkable of all was Albert Dodd, Pro- 
fessor of Mathematics and Lecturer on Architecture. This 
man was a genius of such a high order, that had it not been 
for the false position in which he was placed, he would have 



I 

BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 85 

given to tlie world great works. The false position was tins : 
he was the chief pulpit orator of the old school, and had 
made war on the Transcendentalist movement in an able 
article in the Princeton Review (which, by the way, was use- 
ful in guiding me to certain prohibited works, before un- 
known to me). But as he was a man of poetic genial feel- 
ing, he found himself irresistibly fascinated by what he had 
hunted down, and so read Plato, and when he died actually 
left behind him a manuscript translation of Spinoza's works ! 

The reader may imagine what a marvellous find I was to 
him. George Boker, who was ages beyond me in knowledge 
of the world — man and woman — said one day that he could 
imagine how Dodd sat and chuckled to hear me talk, which 
remark I did not at all understand and thought rather stupid. 
I remember that during my first call on him we discussed 
Sartor Resartus^ and I expressed it as my firm conviction 
that the idea of the Clothes Philosophy had been taken from 
the Treatise on Fire and Salt by the Eosicrucian Lord Blaise. 
Then, in all naivete and innocence of effect, I discussed some 
point in Kant's " Critic," and a few other trifles not usu- 
ally familiar to sub-Freshmen, and took my departure, very 
much pleased at having entered on a life where my favourite 
reading did not really seem to be quite silly or disreputable. 
I remember, however, being ver}^ much surprised indeed at 
finding that the other students, in whom I expected to en- 
counter miracles of learning, or youth far superior to myself 
in erudition and critical knowledge, did not quite come up to 
my anticipations. However, as they were all far beyond me 
in mathematics, I supposed their genius had all gone in that 
direction, for well I knew that the toughest page in Fichte 
was a mere trifle compared to the awful terrors of the Eule of 
Three, and so treated them as young men who were my su- 
periors in other and greater things. 

There were wearisome morning prayers in the chapel, and 

roll-call every morning, and then an hour of recitation before 

breakfast, study till ten or eleven, study and recitation in the 
5 



gg MEMOIRS. 

afternoon, and evening prayers again and study in the even- 
ing. The Sabbath was anything but a day of rest, for we had 
the same prayers ; morning attendance at church ; afternoon, 
the learning and reciting of four chapters in the Bible ; while 
we were expected in the evening to master one or two chap- 
ters in the Greek Testament. I am not sorry that I used to 
read books during sermon-time. It kept me from, or from 
me, a great deal of wickedness. Videlicet : 

The sermons consisted principally of assertion that man 
himself consisted chiefly of original sin. As evil communica- 
tions corrupt good manners, I myself, being young and im- 
pressionable, began to believe that I too was an awful sinner. 
Not knowing where else to look for it, I concluded that it con- 
sisted in my inability to learn mathematics. I do not dis- 
tinctly remember whether I prayed to Heaven that I might 
be able to cross the Pons Asinorum, but " anyway " my prayer 
was granted when I graduated. 

Another stock-piece in the repertoire consisted of attacks 
on Voltaire, Tom Paine, and other antiquated Deists or infi- 
dels. I had read with great contempt a copy of " The Rights 
of Man " belonging to my genial uncle Amos. I say with 
great contempt, for I always despised that kind of free 
thought which consisted chiefly of enmity to Christianity. 
Now I can see that Voltaire and his followers were quite in 
the right in warring on terrible and immediate abuses which 
oppressed mankind ; but I had learned from Spinoza to be- 
lieve that every form of faith was good in its way or accord- 
ing to its mission or time, and that it was silly to ridicule 
Christianity because the tale of Balaam's ass was incredible. 
Paine was to me just what a Positivist now is to a Darwinian 
or Agnostic, and such preaching against " infidels " seemed 
to me like pouring water on a drowned mouse. There had 
always been in Mr. Furness's teaching a very decided degree 
of Rationalism, and I had advanced far more boldly on the 
track. I remember reading translations from Schleiermacher 
and buying Strauss's " Life of Jesus " before I went to Prince- 



BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 87 

ton — I saw Strauss himself in after years at Weinsberg, in 
Germany — but at Princeton the slightest approach to explain- 
ing the most absurd story in the Old Testament was regarded 
as out-and-out atheism. It had all happened, we were told, 
just as it is described. 

I may as well note here the fact that for many years in 
my early life such a thing as only reading a book through 
once rarely happened, when I could obtain it long enough. 
Even the translations of the Neo-Platonists, with Campa- 
nella, Yanini, or the Italian naturalists, were read and re- 
read, while the principal English poets, and such books as I 
owned, were perused daily. 

And here in this great infant arithmetic school I was iu 
due time set down to study Paley's " Evidences of Chris- 
tianity" and Locke on the Understanding — like Carlyle's 
young lion invited to a feast of chickweed. Apropos of the 
first, I have a droll reminiscence. There had been in Phila- 
delphia two years before a sale of a fine library, and I had 
been heart-broken because my means had not permitted me 
to buy the works of Sir Kenelm Digby. However, I found 
them in the Princeton College Library. The first thing I 
came to in Paley was his famous simile of the watch — taken 
bodily and without acknowledgment from Digby. The theft 
disgusted me. " These be your Christian champions ! " I 
thought — 

" Would any of the stock of infidels 
Had been my evidence ere such a Christian ! " 

And, moreover, Paley forgets to inform us what conclu- 
sion the finder might draw if he had picked up a badly made 
watch which did not keep good time — like this our turnip of 
a world at times ! 

As we were obliged to attend divine service strictly on 
Sunday, I was allowed to go to the Episcopal church in the 
village, which agreed very well with my parents' views. I 
quite fell into the sentiment of the sect, and so went to Pro- 
fessor Dodd to ask for permission from the Faculty to change 



88 MEMOIRS. 

my religion. When he asked me how it was that I had rene- 
gaded into Trinitarianism, I replied that it was due to reflec- 
tion on the perfectly obvious and usual road of the Platonic 
hypostases eked out with Gnosticism. I had found in the 
College Library, and read with great pleasure almost as soon 
as I got there, Cud worth's " Intellectual System " (I raided a 
copy as loot from a house in Tennessee in after years, during 
the war), and learned from it that " it was a religious instinct 
of man to begin with a Trinity, in which I was much aided 
by Schelling, and that there was no trace of a Trinity in the 
Bible, or rather the contrary, yet that it ought consistently to 
have been there " — a sentiment which provoked from Pro- 
fessor Dodd a long whistle like that of Uncle Toby with 
Lilliburlero. " For," as I ingeniously represented, " man or 
God consists of the Monad from which developed spirit or 
intellect and soul ; for toto enim in miindo lucet Trias cnjus 
Monas est princeps^ as the creed of the Eosicrucians begins 
(which is taken from the Zoroastrian oracles)" — here there 
was another long subdued whistle — " and it is set forth on 
the face of every Egyptian temple as the ball, the wings of 
the spirit which rusheth into all v/orlds, and the serpent, 
which is the Logos." Here the whistle became more symj)a- 
thetic, for Egypt was the professor's great point in his lec- 
tures on architecture. And having thus explained the true 
grounds of the Trinity to the most learned theologian of the 
Presbyterian sect, I took my leave, quite unconscious that I 
had said anything out of the common, for all I meant was 
to give my reasons for going back to the Episcopal Church. 
As for Professor Dodd, he had given me up from the very 
first interview to follow my idols as I pleased, only just 
throwing in argument enough to keep me well going. He 
would have been the last man on earth to throw down 
such a marvellous fairy castle, goblin-built and elfin-ten- 
anted, from whose windows rang ^olian harps, and which 
was lit by night with undying Kosicrucian lamps, to erect 
on its ruin a plain brick, Old School Presbyterian slated 



BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 89 

chapel. I was far more amusing as I was, and so I was 
let alone. 

I had passed my examination about the end of June, and 
I was to remain in Princeton until the autumn, reading under 
a tutor, in the hope of being able to join the Sophomore 
class when the college course should begin. There I was 
utterly alone, and rambled by myself in the woods. I be- 
lieved myself to be a very good Christian in those days -, but 
I was really as unaffected and sincere a Poly-Pantheist or 
Old Nature heathen as ever lived in Etrusco-Eoman or early 
German days. A book very dear to my heart at that time 
was the Ctwiositez Inouyes of Gaflarel (Trollope was under 
the impression that he was the only man in Europe who ever 
read it), in which there is an exquisite theory that the stars 
of heaven in their courses and the lines of winding rivers and 
bending corn, the curves of shells and minerals, rocks and 
trees, yes, of all the shapes of all created things, form the 
trace and letters of a stupendous ivriting or characters spread 
all over the universe, which writing becomes little by little 
legible to the one who by communion with Nature and ear- 
nest faith seeks to penetrate the secret. I had found in the 
lonely woods a small pond by a high rock, where I often sat 
in order to attain this blessed illumination, and if I did not 
get quite so far as I hoped, I did in reality attain to a deep 
unconscious familiarity with birds and leafy shades, still 
waters, and high rising trees ; in short, with all the sweet 
solemnity of sylvan nature, which has ever since influenced 
all my life. I mean this not in the second-hand way in 
which it is so generally understood, but as a real existence in 
itself, so earnestly felt that I was but little short of talking 
with elfin beings or seeing fairies flitting over flowers. Those 
who explain everything by " imagination " do not in the least 
understand how actual the life in Nature m.av become to us. 
Eeflect for a minute, thou whose whole soul is in gossip and 
petty chronicles of fashion, and " sassiety," that in that life 
thou ivert a million years ago, and in it thou wilt be a million 



90 MEMOIRS. 

years hence, ever going on in all forms, often enough in 
rivers, rock, and trees, and yet canst not realise with a sense 
of awe that there are in these forms, passing to others — ever, 
ever on — myriads of men and women, or at least their life — 
hoiv we know not, as what we know not — only this, that the 
Will or creative force of the Creator or Creating is in it all. 
This was the serious yet unconscious inspiration of my young 
life in those days, in even more elaborate or artistic form, 
which all went very well hand in hand with the Euclid and 
Homer or Demosthenes and Livy with which my tutor Mr. 
Schenk (pronounce Shank) was coaching me. 

My reading may seem to the reader to have been more 
limited than it was, because I have not mentioned the his- 
torians, essayists, or belletrists whose works are read more or 
less by " almost everybody." It is hardly worth while to say, 
what must be of course surmised, that Sterne, Addison, Gold- 
smith, Johnson, Swift, and Macaulay — in fine, the leading 
English classics — were really well read by me, my ambition 
being not to be ignorant of anything which a literary man 
should know. Macaulay was then new, and I devoured not 
only his works, but a vast amount by him suggested. I 
realised at an early age that there was a certain cycle of 
knowledge common to all really cultivated minds, and this I 
was determined to master. I had, however, little indeed of 
the vanity of erudition, having been deeply convinced and 
constantly depressed or shamed by the reflection that it was 
all worse than useless, and injurious to making my way in 
life. When I heard that Professor Dodd had said that at 
seventeen there were not ten men in America who had read 
so much, while Professor Joseph Henry often used words to 
this effect, and stern James Alexander in his lectures would 
make deeply learned allusions intended for me alone — as, for 
instance, to Kant's " ^sthetik " — I was anything but elated 
or vain in consequence. I had read in Sartoi' Besarhcs, " If 
a man reads, shall he not be learned ? " and I knew too well 
that reading was with me an unprofitable, perhaps pitiable. 



BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 91 

incurable mania-amusement, which might ruin me for life, 
and which, as it was, was a daily source of apprehension be- 
tween me and my good true friends, who feared wisely for 
my future. 

I absolutely made James Alexander smile for once in his 
life — 'twas sunshine on the grim Tarpeian rock. I had 
bought me a nice English large type Juvenal, and written on 
the outside in quaint Elizabethan character form — I forget 
now the name of the author — the following : — 

" Ay, Juvenall, thy jerking hande is good, 
Not gently laying on, but bringing bloude. 
Oh, suffer me amonge so manye men 
To treade aright the traces of thy penne. 
And hght my lamp at thy eternal flame ! " 

We students in the Latin class had left our books on a 
table, when I saw grim and dour James Alexander pick up 
my copy, read the inscription, when looking up at me he 
smiled ; it was a kind of poetry which pleased him. 

I remember, too, how one day, when in Professor Dodd's 
class of mathematics, I, instead of attending to the lecture, 
read surreptitiously Cardanus de Siihtilitate in an old vellum 
binding, and carelessly laid it on the table afterwards, where 
Professor Dodd found it, and directed at me one of his half- 
laughing Mephistophelian glances. Eeading of novels in 
lectures was not unknown ; but for Dodd to find anything so 
caviare-like as Cardanus among our books was unusual. 
George Boker remarked once, that while Professor Dodd 
was a Greek, Professor James Alexander was an old Eoman, 
which was indeed a good summary of the two. 

I have and always had a bad memory, but I continued to 
retain what I read by repetition or reviewing and by colloca- 
tion^ which is a marvellous aid in retaining images. For, in 
the first place, I read entirely by gkoups ; and if I, for in- 
stance, attacked Blair's " Rhetoric," Longinus and Burke 
promptly followed ; and if I perused " Rambles in the Foot- 
steps of Don Quixote," I at once, on principle, followed it up 



92 MEMOIRS. 

with " Spain in 1830," and a careful study of Ford's Guide- 
Book for Spain, and perhaps a score of similar books, till I 
had got Spain well into me. And as I have found by years 
of observation and much research, having written a book on 
Education partly based on this principle, ten books on any 
subject read together, jDrofit more than a hundred at inter- 
vals. And I may here add, that if this record of what I 
read be dull, it is still that of my real youthful life, giving 
the clue to my mind as it was formed. Books in those days 
were the only events of my life. 

Long before I went to college I had an attack of Irish 
antiquities, which I relieved by reading O'Brien, Vallancey, 
the more sensible Petrie, and O'Somebody's Irish grammar, 
aided by old Annie Mooney, who always remained by us. In 
after years I discovered an Ogham inscription and the famed 
Ogham tongue, or Shelta, " the lost language of the bards," 
according to Kuno Meyer and John Sampson. 

During my first half-year a college magazine was pub- 
lished, and I, a Freshman, was requested to contribute to the 
first number. I sent in an article on the history of English 
poetry. Before I wrote it, the great man among the senior 
students asked leave to be allowed to write it with me. I did 
not quite like the idea, but reflecting that the association 
would give me a certain prestige, I accepted his aid. So it 
appeared ; but it was regarded as mine. Professor Dodd said 
something to me about the inexpediency of so young a per- 
son appearing in print. I could have told him that I had 
already published several poems, &c., in Philadelphian news- 
papers, but reflecting that it was not kind to have the better 
of him, I said nothing. From that time I published some- 
thing in every number. My second article was an essay on 
Spinoza, and I still think it was rather good for a boy of 
sixteen. 

There was the College and also a Society library, out of 
which I picked a great deal of good reading. One day I 
asked Professor John MacLean, the college librarian, for the 



BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 93 

works of Condorcet. His reply was, " Vile book ! vile book ! 
can't have it." However, I found in the Society library Ur- 
quhart's translation of " Kabelais," which I read, I daresay, as 
often as any mortal ever did. And here I have a word to say 
to the wretched idiots who regard " the book called Eabelais " 
as " immoral " and unfit for youth. Many times did I try to 
induce my young friends to read " Rabelais," and some actu- 
ally mastered the story of th-e goose as a torche-cul^ and per- 
haps two or three chapters more ; but as for reading through 
or enjoying it, " that was not in their minds." All com- 
plained, or at least showed, that they "did not understand 
it." It was to them an aggravating farrago of filth and 
oddity, under which they suspected some formal allegory or 
meaning which had perished, or was impenetrable. Learn 
this, ye prigs of morality, that no work of genius ever yet de- 
moralised a dolt or ignoramus. Even the Old Testament, 
with all its stores of the " shocking," really does very little 
harm. It requires mind for mind in reading, and vice be- 
comes unattractive even to the vicious when they cannot under- 
stand it. I did understand Eabelais, and the Moye7i de Par- 
venir, and the Cymhalum Mundi^ and Boccaccio (I owned 
these books), and laughed over them, yet was withal as pure- 
minded a youth as could well be imagined without being a 
simpleton. For, with all such reading, I best loved such a 
book as Bromley's " Sabbath of Rest," or sweet, strange 
works of ancient Mysticism, which bore the soul away to the 
stars or into Nature. Such a combination is perfectly pos- 
sible when there is no stain of dishonesty or vulgarity in the 
character, and I had escaped such influences easily enough. 

A droll event took place in the spring. It had been usual 
once a year — I forgot on what occasion — to give to all the 
classes a holiday. This year it was abolished, and the Sopho- 
more, junior, and senior classes quietly acquiesced. But w^e, 
the Freshmen, albeit we had never been there before, rebelled 
at such infringement of " our rights," and absented ourselves 
from recitation. I confess that I was a leader in the move- 



94 MEMOIRS. 

ment, because I sincerely believed it to be a sin to " remove 
old landmarks," and that the students required more rest and 
holidays than were allowed them ; in which I was absolutely 
in the right, for our whole life, except Saturday afternoons, 
was " one demuition grind." 

The feeling which was excited by this " Freshman's rebel- 
lion" was one of utter amazement, or awful astonishment 
tempered with laughter, not unmingled with respect. It was 
the terrier flying at the lion, when the great mastiff, and 
bloodhound, and Danish dog had quietly slunk aside. There 
were in the class beside myself several youths of marked 
character, and collectively we had already made an impres- 
sion, to which my intimacy with George Boker, and Professor 
Dodd, and the very elite of the seniors, added not a little 
force. We were mysterious. Hitherto a Freshman had been 
the greenest of the green, a creature created for ridicule, a 
sort of " leathery fox " or mere tyro (ty — not a ty-pographical 
error — pace my kind and courteous reviewer in the Satur- 
day) — and here were Freshmen of a new kind rising in dig- 
nity above all others. 

Which reminds me of a merry tale. It was usual for 
Freshmen to learn to smoke for the first time after coming 
to college, and for more advanced students to go to their 
rooms, or find them in others, and smoke them sick or into 
retreating. I, however, found a source of joy in this, that I 
could now sit almost from morning till night, and very often 
on to three in the morning, smoking all the time, being 
deeply learned in Varinas, Kanaster, and the like; for I 
smoked nothing but real Holland tobacco, while I could buy 
it. A party of Sophomores informed George Boker that 
they intended to smoke me out. " Smoke Mm out ! " quoth 
George ; " why, he'd smoke the whole of you dumb and blind." 
However, it came to pass that one evening several of them 
tried it on ; and verily they might as well have tried it on to 
Niklas Henkerwyssel, who, as the legend goes, sold his soul 
to the devil for the ability to smoke all the time, to whom my 



BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 95 

father had once compared me. So the cigars and tobacco 
were burned, and I liked it extremely. Denser grew the 
smoke, and the windows were closed, to which I cheerfully 
assented, for I liked to have it thick ; and still more smoke 
and more, and the young gentlemen who had come to 
smother me grew pale, even as the Porcupines grew pale 
when they tried to burn out the great Indian sorcerer, who 
burned them I But I, who was beginning to enjoy myself 
amazingly in such congenial society, only filled Boker's great 
meerschaum with Latakia, and puffed away. One by one the 
visitors also " puffed away," i. e., vanished through the door 
into the night. 

" Shall I open the window ? " asked George. 

" IS; ot on my account," I replied. " I rather enjoy it as 
it is." 

" I begin to believe," replied my friend, " that you would 
like it in Dante's hell of clouds. Do you know what those 
men came here for ? It was to smoke you out. And you 
smoked them out, and never knew it." Which was perfectly 
true. As for smoking, my only trouble was to be able to buy 
cigars and tobacco. These were incredibly cheap in those 
days, and I always dressed very respectably, but my smoking 
always cost me more than my clothing. 

When we Freshmen had rebelled, we were punished by 
being rusticated or sent into the country to board. I went 
to Professor Dodd to receive my sentence, and in a grave 
voice, in which was a faint ring as of irony, and with the 
lurking devil which always played in his great marvellous 
mysterious black eyes, he said, " If you were any other stu- 
dent, I would not send you to the city, and so reward your 
rebellion with a holiday. But as I know perfectly well that 
you will go into the Philadelphia Library, and never stop 
reading till it is time to return, I will send you there." 

My parents were then absent with my younger sisters in 
New England, but I had unlimited credit at Congress Hall 
Hotel, which was kept by a Mr. John Sturdevant, and where 



96 MEMOIRS. 

I was greatly respected as the son of the owner of the prop- 
erty. So I went there, and fared well, and, as Professor 
Dodd prophesied, read all the time. One night I went into 
an auction of delightful old books. My money had run low ; 
there only remained to me one dollar and a half. 

Now, of all books on earth, what I most yearned for in 
those days were the works of Jacob Behmen. And the auc- 
tioneer put up a copy containing " The Aurora or Morning 
Kednesse," English version {circa 1636), and I bid. One 
dollar — one dollar ten cents — twenty — twenty-five ; my heart 
palpitated, and I half fainted for fear lest I should be out- 
bid, when at the very last I got it with my last penny. 

The black eyes of Professor Dodd twinkled more elfishly 
than ever when I exhibited to him my glorious treasure. He 
evidently thought that my exile had been to me anything but 
a punishment, and he was right. For a copy of Anthropo- 
sopJios Tlieomagicus or the works of Eobert Fludd I would 
have got up another rebellion. 

It was quite against the college regulations for students 
to live in the town, but as I never touched a card, was totally 
abstemious and " moral," and moreover in rather delicate 
health, I was passed over as an odd exception. Once or twice 
it was proposed to bring me in, but Professor Dodd interfered 
and saved me. While in Princeton for more than four years, 
I never once touched a drop of anything stronger than coffee, 
which was a great pity ! Exercise was not in those days en- 
couraged in any way whatever — in fact, playing billiards and 
ten-pins was liable to be punished by expulsion ; there was no 
gymnasium, no boating, and all. physical games and manly ex- 
ercises were sternly discouraged as leading to sin. Now, if I 
had drunk a pint of bitter ale every day, and played cricket 
or " gymnased," or rowed for two hours, it would have saved 
me much suffering, and to a great degree have relieved me 
from reading, romancing, reflecting, and smoking, all of 
which I carried to great excess, having an inborn impulse to 
be always doing something. That I did not grapple with 



BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 97 

life as a real thing, or with prosaic college studies or society, 
was, I can now see, a disease, for which, as my peculiar tastes 
had come upon me from nervous and Unitarian and Alcott- 
ian evil influences, I was not altogether responsible. I was 
a precocious l?oy, and I had fully developed extraordinary 
influences, which, like the seed of Scripture, had in my case 
fallen on more than fertile ground ; it was like the soil of the 
Margariten Island, by Budapest, which is so permeated by 
hot springs in a rich soil that everything comes to maturity 
there in one- third of the time which it does elsewhere. I 
was the last child on earth who should ever have fallen into 
Alcott's hands, or listened to Dr. Channing or Furness, or 
have been interested in anything " ideal " ; but fate willed 
that I should drink the elfin goblet to the dregs. 

George H. Boker had a great influence on me. We were 
in a way connected, for my uncle Amos had married his aunt, 
and my cousin, Benjamin Godfrey, his cousin. He was ex- 
actly six feet high, with the form of an Apollo, and a head 
which was the very counterpart of the bust of Byron. A 
few years later N. P. Willis described him in the Home 
Journal as the handsomest man in America. He had been 
from boyhood as precociously a man of the world as I was 
the opposite. He was par hninence the poet of our college, 
and in a quiet, gentlemanly way its " swell." I passed a 
great deal of my time in his rooms reading Wordsworth, 
Shelley, and Byron, the last named being his ideal. He ridi- 
culed the Lakers, w^hom I loved ; and when Southey's last 
poem, " On Gooseberry Pie," appeared, he declared that the 
poor old man was in his dotage, to which I assented with 
sorrow in my heart. Though only one year older than I, 
yet, as a Junior, and from his superior knowledge of life, I 
regarded him as being about thirty. He was quite familiar, 
in a refined and gentlemanly way, with all the dissipation of 
Philadelphia and New York ; nor was the small circle of his 
friends, with whom I habitually associated, much behind him 
in this respect. Even during this Junior year he was offered 



98 



MEMOIRS. 



the post of secretiiry to our Ambassador at Vienna. From 
him and the others I acquired a second-hand knowledge of 
life, which was sufficient to keep me from being regarded as a 
duffer or utterly " green," though in all such "life " I was prac- 
tically as innocent as a young nun. Now, whatever I heard, 
as well as read, I always turned over and over in my mind, 
thoroughly digesting it to a most exceptional degree. So that 
I was somewhat like the young lady of whom I heard in Vienna 
in after years. She was brought up in the utmost moral and 
strict seclusion, but she found in her room an aperture through 
which she could witness all that took place in the neighbour- 
ing room of ii7naiso?i de passe j but being a great philosopher, 
she in time regarded it all as the " butterfly passing show " of 
a theatre, the mere idle play of foolish mortal passions. 

Even before I began my Freshman year there came into 
my life a slight but new and valuable influence. Professor 
Dodd, when I arrived, had just begun his course of lectures 
on architecture. To my great astonishment, but not at all 
to that of George Boker, I was invited to attend the course, 
Boker remarking dryly that he had no doubt that Dodd 
thanked God for having at last got an auditor who would 
appreciate him. Which I certainly did. I in after years 
listened to the great Thiersch, who trained Heine to art, and 
of whom I was a special protege, and many great teachers, 
but I never listened to any one like Albert Dodd. It was 
not with him the mere description of styles and dates ; it 
was a deep and truly aesthetic feeling that every phase of 
architecture mirrors and reciprocally forms its age, and 
breathes its life and poetry and religion, which characterised 
all that he said. It was in nothing like the subjective rhap- 
sodies of Euskin, which bloomed out eight years later, but 
rather in the spirit of Vischer and Taine, which J. A. Sy- 
monds has so beautifully and clearly set forth in his Essays * 

* May I be pardoned for here mentioning that Mr. Symonds, not 
long before his death, wrote a letter to one of our mutual friends, in 



BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 99 

— that is, the spirit of historical development. Here my 
German philosophy enabled me to grasp a subtle and delicate 
spirit of beauty, which passed, I fear, over the heads of the 
rest of the youthful audience. His ideas of the correspond- 
ence of Egyptian architecture to the stupendous massiveness 
of Pantheism and the appalling grandeur of its ideas, were 
clear enough to me, who had copied Hermes Trismegistus 
and read with deepest feeling the Orphic and Chaldean ora- 
cles. The ideas had not only been long familiar to me, but 
formed my very life and the subject of the most passionate 
study. To hear them clearly expressed with rare beauty, in 
the deep, strange voice of the professor, was joy beyond be- 
lief. And as it would not be in human nature for a lecturer 
not to note an admiring auditor, it happened often enough 
that something was often introduced for my special appreci- 
ation. 

For I may here note — and it was a very natural thing — 
that just as Gypsy musicians always select in the audience 
some one who seems to be most appreciative, at whom they 
play (they call it de hdn)^ so Professors Dodd and James 
Alexander afterwards, in their aesthetic, or more erudite dis- 
quisitions, rarely failed to fiddle at me — Dodd looking right 
in my eyes, and Alexander at the ceiling, ending, however, 
with a very brief glance, as if for conscience' sake. I feel 
proud of this, and it affects me more now than it did then, 
when it produced no. effect of vanity, and seemed to me to 
be perfectly natural. 

I heard certain mutterings and hoots among the students 
as I went out of the lecture-room, but did not know what 
it meant. George Boker informed me afterwards that there 
had been great indignation expressed that " a green ignorant 
Freshman " had dared to intrude, as I had done, among his 
intellectual superiors and betters, but that he had at once ex- 

which he spoke " most enthusiastically " of my work on " Etruscan 
Roman Traditions in Popular Tradition." " For that alone would I 
have writ the book." 

L.ofC 



100 MEMOIRS. 

plained that I was a great friend of Professor Dodd, and a 
kind of marvellous vara avis, not to be classed with common 
little Freshmen ; so that in future I was allowed to go my 
way in peace. 

A man of culture who had known Coleridge well, declared 
that as a conversationalist on varied topics Professor Albert 
Dodd was his superior. When in the pulpit, or in the length- 
ened " addresses " of lecturing, there was a marvellous fas- 
cination in his voice — an Italian witch, or red Indian, or a 
gypsy would have at once recognised in him a sorcerer. Yet 
his manner was subdued, his voice monotonous, never loud, 
a running stream without babbling stones or rapids ; but 
when it came to a climax cataract he cleared it with grand- 
eur, leaving a stupendous impression. In the ordinary mo- 
notony of that deep voice there was soon felt an indescribable 
charm. In saying this I only repeat what I have heard in 
more or less diiferent phrase from others. There was always 
in his eyes (and in this as in other points he resembled Emer- 
son) a strange indefinable suspicion of a smile, though he, 
like the Sage of Concord, rarely laughed. Owing to these 
black eyes, and his sallow complexion, his sobriquet among 
the students was " the royal Bengal tiger." He was not un- 
like Emerson as a lecturer. I heard the latter deliver his 
great course of lectures in London in 1848 — including the 
famous one on Napoleon — but he had not to the same per- 
fection the music of the voice, nor the indefinable mysterious 
charm which characterised the style of Professor Dodd, who 
played with emotion as if while feeling he was ever superior 
to it. He was a great actor, who had gone far beyond acting 
or art. 

Owing, I suppose, to business losses, my father and family 
lived for two years either at Congress Hall Hotel or e?i pen- 
S1071. I spent my first vacation at the former place. There 
lived in the house a Colonel John Du SoUe, the editor of a 
newspaper. He was a good-natured, rather dissipated man, 
who kept horses and had a fancy for me, and took me out 



BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 101 

" on drives," and once introduced me in the street to a great 
actress, Susan Cushman,* and very often to theatres and cof- 
fee-houses and reporters, and printed several of my lucubra- 
tions. Du Solle was in after years secretary to P. T. Barnum, 
whom I also knew well. He was kind to me, and I owe him 
this friendly mention. Some people thought him a rather 
dangerous companion for youth, but I was never taken by 
him into bad company or places, nor did I ever hear from him 
a word of which my parents would have disapproved. But I 
really believe that I could at that time, or any other, have 
kept company with the devil and not been much harmed : it 
was not in me. Edgar A. Poe was often in Du Solle's office 
and at Congress Hall. 

In the summer we all went to Stonington, Connecticut, 
where we lived at a hotel called the Wadawanuc House. 
There I went out sailing — once on a clam-bake excursion in 
a yacht owned by Captain Nat. Palmer, who had discovered 
Palmer's Land — and sailed far and wide. That summer I 
also saw on his own deck the original old Vanderbilt himself, 
who was then the captain of a Sound steamboat ; and I 
bathed every day in salt-water, and fished from the wharf, 
and smoked a great deal, and read French books ; and after 
a while we went into Massachusetts and visited the dear old 
villages and Boston, and so on, till I had to return to Prince- 
ton. Soon after mv father took another house in Walnut 
Street, the next door above the one where we had lived. 
This one was rather better, for though it had less garden, it 
had larger back-buildings. 

Bo?i an^ mal an, the time passed away at Princeton for 
four years. I was often very ill. In the last year the phy- 

* " Susan Cushman was extremely pretty, but was not particularly 
gifted; in personal appearance she was altogether unlike Charlotte; 
. . . the latter was a large, tall woman " (" Gossip of the Century," 
vol. ii.). John Du Solle took me for the first time to see Charlotte 
Cushman, and then asked me what I thought she looked like. And I 
rephed, " A bull in black silk." 



102 MEMOIRS. 

sician who tested my lungs declared they were unsound in 
two places ; and about this time I was believed to have con- 
tracted an incurable stoop in the shoulders. One day I re- 
solved that from that minute I would always hold myself 
straight upright ; and I did so, and in the course of time be- 
came as straight as an arrow, and have continued so, I be- 
lieve, ever since. 

I discovered vast treasures of strange reading in the 
library of the Princeton Theological College. There was in 
one corner in a waste-room at least two cart-loads of old 
books in a cob webbed dusty pile. Out of that pile I raked 
the thirteenth known copy of Blind Harry's famed poem, a 
black-letter Euphues Lely, an Erra Pater (a very weak- 
minded friend actually shamed me out of making a copy of 
this great curiosity, telling me it was silly and childish of 
me to be so pleased with old trash), and many more mar- 
vels, which were so little esteemed in Princeton, that one of 
the professors, seeing me daft with delight over my finds, 
told me I was quite welcome to keep them all ; but I, who 
better knew their great value, would not avail myself of the 
ofier, reflecting that a time would come when these treas- 
ures would be properly valued. God knows it was a terrible 
temptation to me, and such as I hope I may never have 
again — ne inducas nos in temptationem ! 

The time for my graduation was at hand. I had profited 
very much in the last year by the teaching and friendly coun- 
sel of Professor Joseph Henry, whose lectures on philosophy 
I diligently attended ; also those on geology, chemistry and 
botany by Professor Torrey, and by the company of Professor 
Topping. I stood very high in Latin, and perhaps first in 
English branches. Yet, because I had fallen utterly short in 
mathematics, I was rated the lowest but one in the class — or, 
honestly speaking, the very last, for the one below me was an 
utterly reckless youth, who could hardly be said to have stud- 
ied or graduated at all. There were two honours usually 
awarded for proficiency in study. One was the First Honour, 



BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 103 

and he who received it delivered the Valedictory Oration ; 
the second was the Poem ; and by an excess of kindness and 
justice for which I can never feel too grateful, and which 
was really an extraordinary stretch of their power under the 
circumstances, the Poem was awarded to me ! 

I was overwhelmed at the honour, but bitterly mortified 
and cut to my heart to think how little I had deserved it ; 
for I had never done a thing save read and study that which 
pleased me and was easy. I wrote the poem (and I still 
think it was a good one, for I put all my soul into it), and 
sent it in to the Faculty, with a letter stating that I was 
deeply grateful for their extreme kindness, but that, feeling 
I had not deserved it, I must decline the honour. But I sent 
them my MS. as a proof that I did not do so because I felt 
myself incapable, and because I wished to give them some 
evidence that they had not erred in regarding me as a poet. 

Very foolish and boyish, the reader may say, and yet I 
never regretted it. The Faculty were not to blame for the 
system pursued, and they did their utmost in every way for 
four years to make it easy and happy for one of the laziest 
and most objectionable students whom they had ever had. I 
have never been really able to decide whether I was right or 
wrong. At liberal Cambridge, Massachusetts, neither I nor 
the professors would ever have discovered a flaw in my indus- 
try. At the closely cramped, orthodox, hide-bound, mathe- 
matical Princeton, every weakness in me seemed to be de- 
veloped. Thirty years later I read in the Nassaic Monthly^ 
which I had once edited, that if Boker and I and a few 
others had become known in literature, we had done so in 
spite of our education there. I do not know who wrote it ; 
whoever he was, I am much obliged to him for a very com- 
forting word. For, discipline apart, it was literally " in spite 
of our education " that we learned anything worth knowing 
at Princeton — as it then was. 

From this point a new phase of life begins. Prominent 



104 MEMOIRS. 

in it and as its moving power was the great kindness of my 
father. That I had graduated at all under any conditions 
was gratifying, and so was the fact that it was not in reality 
without the so-called Second Honour, despite my low grade. 
And the pitiable condition of my health was considered. 
During the last year I had taken lessons in dancing and 
fencing, which helped me a little, and I looked as if I might 
become strong with a change of life. So my father took my 
mother and me on a grand excursion. We went to Stoning- 
ton, New York, and Saratoga, where I attended a ball — my 
first — and then on to Niagara. On the way we stopped at 
Auburn, where there was a great State-prison, which I visited 
alone. There was among its attractions a noted murderer 
under sentence of death. There were two or three ladies and 
gentlemen who were shown by the warder with me over the 
building. He expressed some apprehension as to showing 
us the murderer, for he was a very desperate character. We 
entered a large room, and I saw a really gentlemanly-looking 
man heavily ironed, who was reading a newspaper. While 
the others conversed with him, I endeavoured to make unob- 
served a sketch of his face. The warder noticing this, called 
me to the front to make it boldly, and the prisoner, smiling, 
told me to go on with it ; which I did, and that not so badly 
— at least, the sitter approved of it. 

So we went up the beautiful Hudson, which far surpasses 
the Ehine, and yields the palm only to the Danube, stopping 
at Poughkeepsie and Albany, and so on to Niagara Falls. 
On the way we passed through a burning forest. My awe at 
this wonderful sight amused some one present to whom it 
was a familiar thing. Which reminds me that about the 
time when I first went to college, but while staying at Con- 
gress Hall, I there met a youth from Alabama or Mississippi, 
who was on his way to Princeton to join our ranks. To him 
I of course showed every attention, and by way of promoting 
his happiness took him to the top of the belfry of the State 
House, whence there is a fine view. While there I casually 



BOYHOOD AND YOUTH. 105 

remarked what a number of sliips there were in the river, 
whereupon he eagerly cried, " Oh, show me one ! I never 
saw a ship in all my life ! " I gazed at him in utter aston- 
ishment, as if I would say, " What manner of man art thou ? " 
and then recalling myself, said, " Well, we are just equal, for 
you never saw a ship, and I never saw a cotton-field.'''' The 
young man smiled incredulously, and replied, " Now I know 
that you are trying to humbug me, for how could you grow 
up without ever seeing cotton-fields ? " 

We arrived at Niagara about noon, and I at once went to 
see the Falls. There was a very respectable-looking old gen- 
tleman, evidently from the far South, with two young ladies, 
one a great beauty, advancing just before. I heard him say, 
" Now, keep your eyes closed, or look down till you can have 
a full view." I did the same, and when he cried " Look up ! " 
did so. It was one of the great instants of my life. 

I know not how it was, but that first glance suggested to 
me something chivalric. It may have been from Byron's 
simile of the tail of the white horse and the cataract, and the 
snow-white steed of that incarnation of nobility, Crescentius, 
and there rang in my memory a mystical verse — 

" My eye bears a glance like the gleam of a lance 
When I hear the waters dash and dance ; 
And I smile with glee, for I love to see 
The sight of anything that's free ! " 

But it was a mingled sense of nobility, and above all of 
freedom^ which impressed me in that roaring mist of waters, 
in the wild river leaping as in reckless sport over the vast 
broad precipice. It is usual, especially for those who have no 
gift of description, to say that Niagara is " utterly indescrib- 
able," and the Visitors' Book has this opinion repeated by 
the American Philistine on every page. But that is because 
those who say so have no proper comprehension of facts 
stated, no poetic faculty, and no imagination. Of course no 
mere description, however perfect, would give the same con- 
ception of even a pen or a button as would the sight thereof ; 



IQQ MEMOIRS. 

but it is absurd and illogical to speak as if this were peculiar 
to a great thing alone. For my part, I believe that the mere 
description to a 2Joetf or to one who has dwelt by wood and 
wold and steeped his soul in Nature, of a tremendous cataract 
a mile in breadth and two hundred feet high, cleft by a 
wooded island, and rushing onward below in awful rocky 
rapids with a mighty roar, would, could, or should convey a 
very good idea of the great sight. For I found in after 
years, when I came to see Venice and the temples on the 
Nile, that they were picturesquely or practically precisely 
what I had expected to see, not one shade or nuance of an 
expression more or less. As regards Rome and all Gothic 
cathedrals, I had been assured so often, or so generally, by all 
" intelligent tourists," that they were all wretched rubbish, 
that I was amazed to find them so beautiful. And so much 
as to anticipations of Niagara, which I have thrice visited, 
and the constant assertion by cads unutterable that it is " in- 
describable." 

While at Niagara for three days, I walked about a great 
deal with a young lady whose acquaintance we had made at 
the hotel. As she was, I verily believe, the very first, not a 
relative, with whom I had ever taken a walk, or, I may al- 
most say, formed an acquaintance, it constituted an event in 
my life equal to Niagara itself in importance. I was at this 
time just twenty-one, and certain I am that among twenty- 
one thousand college graduates of my age in America, of the 
same condition of life, there was not another so inexperienced 
in worldly ways, or so far behind his age, or so " docile unto 
discipline." I was, in fact, morally where most boys in the 
United States are at twelve or thirteen ; which is a very great 
mistake where there is a fixed determination that the youth 
shall make his own way in life. We cannot have boys good 
little angels at home and devils in business abroad. — Horum 
utrum mag is velim^ mihi incertum est. 



III. 

UNIVERSITY LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 

1845-1848. 

Passage in a sailing ship — Gibraltar — Marseilles — Smugglers and a 
slaver — Italy — Life in Rome — Torlonia's balls and the last great 
Carnival of 1846 — Navone, the chief of police — Florence — Venice — 
How I passed the Bridge of Sighs — The Black Bait — Slavery — 
Crossing the Simplon — Switzerland — Pleasing introduction to Ger- 
many — Student life at Heidelberg — Captain Medwin — Justinus 
Kerner — How I saw Jenny Lind — Munich — Lola Montez — Our 
house on fire — All over Germany — How 1 was turned out of Po- 
land — Paris in 1847 — The Revolution of 1848 — I become con- 
spirator and captain of barricades — Taking of the Tuileries — The 
police bow me out of France — A season in London — Return to 
America. 

After our return to Philadelphia something of great im- 
portance to me began to be discussed. My cousin Samuel 
Godfrey, who was a few years older than I, finding himself 
threatened with consumption, of which all his family died, 
resolved to go to Marseilles on a voyage, and persuaded my 
father to let me accompany him. At this time I had, as in- 
deed for many years before, such a desire to visit Europe that 
I might almost have died of it. So it was at last determined 
that I should go with " Sam," and after all due preparations 
and packing, I bade farewell to mother and Henry and the 
dear little twin sisters, and youngest Emily, our pet, and 
went with my father to New York, where I was the guest 
for a few days of my cousin, Mrs. Caroline Wight, whom the 
reader may recall as the one who used to correct my French 
exercises in Dedham. 

We were to sail in a packet or ship for Marseilles. My 



108 MEMOIRS. 

father saw me off. He was wont to say in after years, that 
as I stood on the deck at the last moment and looked affec- 
tionately at him, there was in my eyes an expression of inno- 
cence or goodness and gentleness which he never saw again. 
Which was, I am sure, very true ; the great pity being that 
that look had not utterly disappeared years before. If it only 
had vanished with boyhood, as it ought to have done, my 
father would have been spared much sorrow. 

At this time I was a trifle over six feet two in height, and 
had then and for some time after so fair a red and white com- 
plexion, that the young ladies in Philadelphia four years 
later teased me by spreading the report that I used rouge 
and white paint ! I was not as yet " filled out," but held 
.myself straightly, and was fairly proportioned. I Avore a cap 
a Vetudiant^ very much over my left ear, and had very long, 
soft, straight, dark-brown hair ; my dream and ideal being 
the Germ^an student. I was extremely shy of strangers, but 
when once acquainted soon became very friendly, and in most 
cases made a favourable impression. I was " neat and very 
clean-looking," as a lady described me, for the daily bath or 
sponge was universal in Philadelphia long ere it was even in 
England, and many a time when travelling soon after, I went 
without a meal in order to have my tub, when tim^e did not 
permit of both. I was very sensitive, and my feelings were 
far too easily pained ; on the other hand, I had no trace of 
the common New England youth's vulgar failing of nagging, 
teasing, or vexing others under colour of being " funny " or 
" cute." A very striking, and, all things considered, a re- 
markable characteristic was that I liated^ as I still do, with 
all my soul, gossip about other people and their affairs ; never 
read even a card not meant for my eyes, and detested curi- 
osity, prying, and inquisitiveness as I did the devil. J owe a 
great development of this to a curious incident. It must 
have been about the time when I first went to college, that I 
met at Cape May a naval officer, who roomed with me in a 
cottage, a farm-house near a hotel, and whom I greatly ad- 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 109 

mired as a man of the world and a model of good manners. 
To him one day I communicated some gossip about some- 
body, when he abruptly cut me short, and when I would go 
on, informed me that he never listened to such talk. This 
made a very deep impression on me, which never disap- 
peared ; nay, it grew with my growth and strengthened with 
my strength. Now the New England people, especially Bos- 
tonians, are inordinately given to knowing everything about 
everybody, and to " tittle-tattle," while the Southerners are 
comparatively free from it and very incurious. Two-thirds 
of the students at Princeton were of the first families in tlie 
South, and there my indifference to what did not personally 
concern one was regarded as a virtue. But there is a spot in 
this sun — that he who never cares a straw to know about the 
affairs of other people, will, not only if he live in Boston, but 
almost anywhere else — Old England not at all excepted — be 
forced, in spite of himself, and though he were as meek and 
lowly as man may be, into looking down on and feeling him- 
self superior unto those people who will read a letter not 
meant for their eyes, or eavesdrop, or talk in any way about 
anybody in a strain to which they would not have that per- 
son listen. Which reminds me that in after years I got some 
praise in the newspapers for the saying that a Yankee's 
idea of hell was a place where he must mind his own busi- 
ness. It came about in this way. In a letter to Charles 
Astor Bristed I made this remark, and illustrated it with a 
picture of Virgil taking a Yankee attired in a chimney-pot 
hat and long night-gown into the Inferno, over whose gate 

was written — 

" Badate a vostri affari voi che intrate ! " 
(Mind your own business ye who enter here !) 

One day soon after my arrival at Princeton, George Boker 
laid on the table by me a paper or picture w^ith its face down. 
I took no notice of it. After a time he said, " Why don't you 
look at that picture ? " I replied simply, " If you wanted me 
to see it you would have turned it face up." To which he 
6 



110 MEMOIRS. 

remarked, " I put it there to see whether you would look at 
it. I thought you would not." George was a " deep, saga- 
cious file," who studied men like books. ? 

My cousin who accompanied me had as a boy " run away 
and gone to sea " cod-fishing on the Grand Banks. If I had 
gone with him it would have done me good. Another 
cousin, Benjamin Stimson, did the same ; he is the S. often 
mentioned in Dana's " Two Years Before the Mast." Dana 
and Stimson were friends, and ran away together. It was 
quite the rule for all my Yankee cousins to do this, and they 
all benefited by it. In consequence of his nautical experi- 
ence Sam was soon at home among all sailors, and not having 
my scruples as to knowing who was who or their affairs, soon 
knew everything that was going on. Our captain was a 
handsome, dissipated, and " loud " young man, with rather 
more sail than ballast, but good-natured and obliging. 

" Come day, go day," we passed the Gulf Stream and the 
Azores, and had long sunny calms, when we could not sail, 
and lay about on deck, warm and lazy, and saw the Azores, 
and so on, till we were near the Spanish coast. One evening 
there clipped right under our lee a fisherman's smack. " I 
say, Leland, hail that fellow ! " said the captain. So I called 
in Spanish, " Adonde venga usted?" 

" Da Algesiras," was the reply, which thrilled out of my 
heart the thought that, like the squire in Chaucer — 

" He had been at the siege of Algecir." 

So I called, in parting, " Dios vaya con usted ! " 
Sam informed me that the manner in which I hailed the 
fisherman had made a great impression on the captain, who 
lauded me highly. It also made one on me, because it was 
the first time I ever spoke to a European in Europe ! 

Anon we were boarded by an old w^eather-beaten seadog 
of a Spanish pilot, unto whom I felt a great attraction ; and 
greeting him in Malagan Spanish, such as I had learned from 
Manuel Gori, as Hermano I and offering him with ceremoni- 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. m 

ous politeness a good cigar, I also drew his regards ; all 
Spaniards, as I well knew, being extremely fond, beyond all 
men on earth, of intimacy with gentlemen. We were de- 
layed for two days at Gibraltar. I may here remark, by the 
way, that this voyage of our ship is described in a book by 
Mrs. Fanny Kemble Butler, entitled " A Year of Consolation 
Abroad." She was on board, but never spoke to a soul 
among the passengers. 

I was never acquainted with Mrs. Butler, as I easily might 
have been, for we had some very intimate friends in common ; 
but as a boy I had been " frightened of her" by certain anec- 
dotes as to her temper, and perhaps the influence lasted into 
later years. I have, however, heard her lecture. She was a 
very clever woman, and Mr. Henry James, in Temple Bar for 
March, 1893, thus does justice to her conversational power : 

" Her talk reflected a thousand vanished and present things; but 
there were those of her friends for whom its value was, almost before 
any other, documentary. The generations move so fast and change so 
much, that Mrs. Kemble testified even more than she affected to do, 
which was much, to ancient manners and a close chapter of history. 
Her conversation swarmed with people and with criticism of people, 
with the ghosts of a dead society. She had, in two hemispheres, seen 
every one and known every one, had assisted at the social comedy 
of her age. Her own habits and traditions were in themselves a 
survival of an era less democratic and more mannered. I have no 
room for enumerations, which, moreover, would be invidious ; but the 
old London of her talk — the direction I liked is best to take — was, 
in particular, a gallery of portraits. She made Count d'Orsay fa- 
miliar, she made Charles Greville present ; I thought it wonderful 
that she could be anecdotic about Miss Edgeworth. She reanimated 
the old drawing-rooms, relighted the old lamps, retuned the old pianos. 
The finest comedy of all, perhaps, was that of her own generous whim- 
sicalities. She was superbly willing to amuse, and on any terms ; and 
her temper could do it as well as her wit. If either of these had failed, 
her eccentricities were always there. She had more ' habits ' than most 
people have room in life for, and a theory that to a person of her dis- 
position they were as necessary as the close meshes of a strait- waistcoat. 
If she had not lived by rule (on her showing) she would have lived in- 
fallibly by riot. Her rules and iier riots, her reservations and her con- 



112 MEMOIRS. 

i 

cessions, all her luxuriant theory and all her extravagant practice ; her 
drollery, that mocked at her melancholy ; her imagination, that mocked 
at her drollery ; and her wonderful manners, all her own, that mocked 
a little at everything: these were part of the constant freshness which 
made those who loved her love her so much. ' If my servants can live 
with me a week, they can live with me for ever,' she often said ; ' but the 
first week sometimes kills them.' A domestic who had been long in her 
service quitted his foreign home the instant he heard of her death, and, 
travelling for thirty hours, arrived travel-stained and breathless, like a 
messenger in a romantic tale, just in time to drop a handful of flowers 
into her grave." 

There came on board of our boat a fruit-dealer, and the 
old pilot, seeing that I was about to invest a real in grapes, 
said, " Let me buy them for you " ; which he did, obtaining 
half-a-peck of exquisite large grapes of a beautiful purple 
colour. 

There was a middle-aged lady among the passengers, of 
whom the least I can say was, that she had a great many 
little winning ways of making herself disagreeable. She im- 
posed frightfully on me while on board, getting me to mark 
her trunks for her, and carry them into the hold, &c. (the 
sailors disliked her so much that they refused to touch them), 
and then cut me dead when on shore. This ancient horror, 
seeing me with so many grapes, and learning the price, con- 
cluded that if a mere boy like me could get so many, she, a 
lady, could for four reals lay in a stock which would last for 
life, more or less. So she obtained a bushel-basket, expect- 
ing to get it heaped full ; but what was her wrath at only 
getting for her silver half-dollar just enough to hide the 
bottom thereof ! Great was her rage, but rage availed her 
nought. She did not call old pilots " Brother," or give them 
cigars, or talk Malagano politely. She was not even " half- 
Spanish," and therefore, as we used to say at college of cer- 
tain unpopular people, was " a bad smoke." 

We went on shore on Sunday, which in those days always 
made Gibraltar literally like a fancy ball. The first person 
whom I met was a pretty young lady in full, antique, rich 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. II3 

Castilian costume, followed by a servaut bearing her book of 
devotion. Seeing my gaze of admiration, she smiled, at 
which I bowed, and she returned the salute and went her 
way. Such an event had never happened to me before in all 
my life. I accepted it philosophically as one of a new order 
of things into which I was destined to enter. Then I saw 
men from every part of Spain in quaint dresses, Castilians in 
cloaks, Andalusians in the jaunty majo rig, Gallegcs, Moors 
from the Barbary coast, many Greeks, old Jews in gabardines, 
Scotch Highland soldiers, and endless more — concursus 
sjolendidus — non possum non mirari. 

I felt myself very happy and very much at home in all 
this. I strolled about the streets talking Spanish to every- 
body. Then I met with a smuggler, who asked me if I 
wanted to buy cigars. I did. In New York my uncle 
George had given me a box of five hundred excellent Ha- 
vanas, and these had lasted me exactly twenty days. I had 
smoked the last twenty-five on the last day. So I went and 
bought at a low enough figure a box of the worst cigars I 
had ever met with. But youth can smoke anything — except 
deceit. 

Entrance to the galleries was strictly forbidden in those 
days, but an incorruptible British sergeant, for an incorrupt- 
ible dollar or two, showed us over them. There was, too, a 
remarkable man, a ship-chandler named Felipe, to whom I 
was introduced. Felipe spoke twenty-four languages. He 
boarded every ship and knew everybody. Gibraltar was then 
a vast head-quarters of social evils, or blessings, and Felipe, 
who was a perfect Hercules, mentioned incidentally that he 
had had a new maja^ or moza^ or mtiger, or puta, every night 
for twenty years ! which was confirmed by common report. 
It was a firm principle with him to always change. This ex- 
traordinary fact made me reflect deeply on it as a psycho- 
logical phenomenon. This far surpassed anything I had ever 
heard at Princeton. Then this and that great English dig- 
nitary was pointed out to me — black eyes ogled me — every- 



114 MEMOIRS. 

body was polite, for I had a touch of the Spanish manner 
which I had observed in the ex-Capitan-General and others 
whom I had known in Philadelphia ; and, in short, I saw 
more that was picturesque and congenial in that one day than 
I had ever beheld in all my life before. I had got into " my 
plate." 

From Gibraltar our ship sailed on to Marseilles. The 
coasts were full of old ruins, which I sketched. We lay off 
Malaga for a day, but I could not go ashore, much as I longed 
to. At Marseilles, Sam and the captain and I went to a very 
good hotel. 

Now it had happened that on the voyage before a certain 
French lady — the captain said she was a Baroness — having 
fallen in love with the said captain, had secreted herself on 
board the vessel, greatly to his horror, and reappeared when 
out at sea. Therefore, as soon as we arrived at Marseilles, 
the injured husband came raging on board and tried to shoot 
the captain, which made a great scandal. And, moved by 
this example, the coloured cook of our vessel, who had a wife, 
shot the head-waiter on the same day, being also instigated 
by jealousy. Sam Godfrey chaffed the captain for setting a 
bad moral example to the niggers — which was all quite a 
change from Princeton. Life was beginning to be lively. 

There had come over on the vessel with us, in the cabin, 
a droll character, an actor in a Philadelphia theatre, who had 
promptly found a lodging in a kind of maritime boarding- 
house. Getting into some difficulty, as he could not speak 
French he came in a great hurry to beg me to go with him 
to his pensio7i to act as interpreter, which I did. I found at 
once that it was a Spanish house, and the resort of smugglers. 
The landlady was a very pretty black-eyed woman, who played 
the guitar, and sang Spanish songs, and brought out Spanish 
wine, and was marvellously polite to me, to my astonishment, 
not unmingled with innocent gratitude. 

There I was at home. At Princeton I had learned to play 
the guitar, and from Manuel Gori, who had during all his 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. II5 

boyhood been familiar with low life and smugglers, I had 
learned many songs and some slang. And so, with a crowd 
of dark, fierce, astonished faces round me of men eagerly 
listening, I sang a smuggler's song — 

" Yo que soy contrabandista, 
Y campo a me rlspeto, 
A todos mi desafio, 
Quien me compra hilo negro? 

Ay jaleo ! 

Muchachas jaleo ! 
Quien me compra hilo negro ! " 

Great was the amazement and thundering the applause 
from my auditors. Let the reader imagine a nun of fourteen 
years asked to sing, and bursting out with " Go it while you're 
young!" Then I sang the Tragala^ which coincided with 
the political views of my friends. But my grand coup was 
in reserve. I had learned from Borrow's " Gypsies in Spain " 
a long string of Gitano or Gypsy verses, such as — 

" El eray guillabela, 
El eray obusno ; 
Que avella romanella, 
No avella oLusno ! " 

" Loud sang the gorgio to his fair, 

And thus his ditty ran : — 
' Oh, may the Gypsy maiden come, 

And not the Gypsy man ! ' " 

And yet again — 

" Coruncho Lopez, gallant lad, 

A smuggling he would ride; 
So stole his father's ambling prad, 
And therefore to the galleys sad 

Coruncho now I guide." 

This was a final coup. How the diaholo I, such an innocent 
stranger youth, had ever learned Spanish Gypsy — the least 
knowledge of which in Spain implies unfathomable iniquity 



lie MEMOIRS. 

and fastness — was beyond all comprehension. So I departed 
full of honour amid thunders of applause. 

From the first day our room was the resort of all the 
American ship-captains in Marseilles. We kept a kind of 
social hall or exchange, with wine and cigars on the side- 
table, all of which drojDping in and out rather reminded me 
of Princeton. My friend the actor had pitched upon a young 
English Jew, who seemed to me to be a doubtful character. 
He sang very well, and was full of local news and gossip. 
He, too, was at home among us. One evening our captain 
told us how he every day smuggled ashore fifty cigars in his y 
hat. At hearing this, I saw a gleam in the eyes of the young 
man, which was a revelation to me. When he had gone, I 
said to the captain, " You had better not smuggle any cigars 
to-morrow. That fellow is a spy of the police." 

The next day Captain Jack on leaving his ship was ac- 
costed by the douaniers^ who politely requested him to take 
oil his hat. He refused, and was then told that he must go 
before i\iQ prefet. There the request was renewed. He com- 
plied ; but " forewarned, forearmed " — there was nothing 
in it. 

Captain Jack complimented me on my sagacity, and scold- 
ed the actor for making such friends. But he had uncon- 
sciously made me familiar with one compared to whom the 
spy was a trifle. I have already fully and very truthfully de- 
scribed this remarkable man in an article in Temple Bar^ but 
his proper place is here. He was a little modest-looking Eng- 
lishman, who seemed to me rather to look up to the fast 
young American captains as types or models of more daring 
beings. Sometimes he would tell a mildly-naughty tale as if 
it were a wild thing. He consulted with me as to going to 
Paris and hearing lectures at the University, his education 
having been neglected. He had, I was told, experienced a 
sad loss, having just lost his ship on the Guinea coast. One 
day I condoled with him, saying that I heard he had been 
ruined. 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. I17 

" Yes," replied the captain, " I have. Something like 
this : My mother once had a very pretty housemaid who dis- 
appeared. Some time after I met her magnificently dressed, 
and I said, * Sally, where do you live now ? ' She replied, 
* Please, sir, I don't live anywhere now ; I've been ruined.'' " 

Sam explained to me that the captain had a keg of gold- 
dust and many diamonds, and having wrecked his vessel in- 
tentionally, was going to London to get a heavy insurance. 
He had been " ruined " to his very great advantage. Then 
Sam remarked — 

*' You don't know the captain. I tell you, Charley, that 
man is an old slaver or pirate. See how I'll draw him out." 

'The next day Sam began to talk. He remaiked that he 
had been to sea and had some money which he wished to in- 
vest. His health required a warm climate, such as the Afri- 
can coast. We would both, in fact, like to go into the Guinea 
business. \^Bozales — " sacks of charcoal," I remarked in Span- 
ish slaver- slang.] The captain smiled. He had apparently 
heard the expression before. He considered it. He had a 
great liking for me, and thought that a trip or two under the 
black flag would do me a great deal of good. So he noted 
down our address, and promised that as soon as he should get 
a ship we should hear from him. 

After that the captain, regarding me as enlisted in the 
fraternity, and only waiting till 'twas " time for us to go," 
had no secrets from me. He was very glad that I knew Span- 
ish and French, and explained that if I would learn Coro- 
mantee or Ebo, it would aid us immensely in getting cargoes. 
By the way, I became very well acquainted in after years with 
King George of Bonney, and can remember entertaining him 
with a story how a friend of mine once (in Cuba) bought thir- 
ty Ebos, and on entering the barracoon the next morning, 
found them all hanging by the necks dead, like a row of pos- 
sums in the Philadelphia market — they having, with magnifi- 
cent pluck, and in glorious defiance of Buckra civilisation, 
resolved to go back to Africa. I have found other blacks 



118 MEMOIRS. 

who believed that all good darkies when they die go to Guinea, 
and one of these was very touching and strange. He had been 
brought as a slave-child to South Carolina, but was always 
haunted by the memory of a group of cocoa-palms by a place 
where the wild white surf of the ocean bounded up to the 
shore — a rock, sunshine, and sand. There he declared his 
soul would go. He was a Voodoo, and a man of marvellous 
strange mind. 

Day by day my commander gave me, as I honestly believe, 
without a shadow of exaggeration, all the terrific details of a 
slaver's life, and his strange experiences in buying slaves in 
the interior. Compared to the awful massacres and cruelties 
inflicted by the blacks on one another, the white slave trade 
seemed to be philanthropic and humane. He had seen at the 
grand custom in Dahomey 2,500 men killed, and a pool made 
of their blood into which the king's wives threw themselves 
naked and wallowed. " One day fifteen were to be tortured 
to death for witchcraft. I bought them all for an old dress- 
coat," said the captain. " I didn't want them, for my cargo 
was made up ; it was only to save the poor devils' lives." 

If a slaver could not get a full cargo, and met with a weaker 
vessel which was full, it was at once attacked and plundered. 
Sometimes there would be desperate resistance, with the aid 
of the slaves. " I have seen the scuppers run with blood," 
said the captain. And so on, with much more of the same 
sort, all of which has since been recorded in the " Journal of 
Captain Canot," from which latter book I really learned noth- 
ing new. I might add the " Life of Hobart Pacha," whom I 
met many times in London. A real old-fashioned slaver was 
fully a hundred times worse than an average pirate, because 
he was the latter whenever he wished to rob, and in his busi- 
ness was the cause of far more suffering and death. 

The captain was very fond of reading poetry, his favourite 
being Wordsworth. This formed quite a tie between us. He 
was always rather mild, quiet, and old-fashioned — in fact, muff- 
ish. Once only did I see a spark from him which showed 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. Hg 

what was latent. Captain Jack was describing a most extraor- 
dinary run which we had made before a gale from Gibraltar 
to Cape de Creux, which was, indeed, true enough, he having 
a very fast vessel. But the Guinea captain denied that such 
time had ever been made by any craft ever built. " And I 
have had to sail sometimes pretty fast in my time," he added 
with one sharp glance — no more — but, as Byron says of the 
look of Gulleyaz, 'twas like a short glimpse of hell. Pretty 
fast ! I should think so — now and then from an English 
cruiser, all sails wetted down, with the gallows in the back- 
ground. But as I had been on board with Sam, the question 
was settled. We had made a run which was beyond all prece- 
dent. 

I fancy that the captain, if he escaped the halter or the 
wave, in after years settled down in some English coast- 
village, where he read Wordsworth, and attended church 
regularly, and was probably regarded as a gentle old duffer 
by the younger members of society. But take him for all in 
all, he was the mildest-mannered man that ever scuttled ship 
or cut a throat, and he always behaved to me like a perfect 
gentleman, and never uttered an improper word. 

We had to wait one month till my cousin could get certain 
news from America. We employed the time in travelling in 
the south, visiting Aries, Nismes, Montpellier, and other 
places. An English gentleman named Gordon, whom I had 
met in Marseilles, had given me a letter of introduction to 
M. Saint Rene Taillandier in the latter place. I knew 
nothing at all then about this great man, or that he was the 
first French critic of German literature, but I presented my 
letter, and he kindly went with me about the town to show 
me its antiquities. I can remember discussing Gothic tracery 
with him ; also, that I told him I was deeply interested in 
the Troubadours. He recommended Ravnouard and several 
other books, when finding that I was familiar with them all, 
he smiled, and said that he believed he could teach me 
nothing more. I did not know it then, but that word 



120 MEMOIRS. 

from him would have been as good as a diploma for me in 
Paris. 

As for old Roman ruins and Gothic churches, and cloisters 
grey, and the arrowy Rhone, and castellated bridges — every- 
thing was in a more original moss-grown, picturesque condi- 
tion then than it now is — I enjoyed them all with an in- 
tensity, a freshness or love, which passeth all belief. I had 
attended Professor D odd's lectures more than once, and 
illuminated manuscripts, and had bought me in Marseilles 
Berty's " Dictionary of Gothic Architecture," and got it by 
heart, and began to think of making a profession of it, which, 
if I had known it, was the very wisest thing I could have 
done. And that this is no idle boast is clear from this, that 
I in after years made a design according to which a " store," 
which cost £30,000, was built, my plan being believed by 
another skilled architect to have been executed by a " pro- 
fessional." This was really the sad slip and escape of my 
lifetime. 

In those days, really good red wine was given to every one 
at every table ; savoury old-fashioned dishes, vegetables, and 
fruits were served far more freely and cheaply than they now 
are, when every dainty is sent by rail to Paris or London, 
and the drinking of Bordeaux and Burgundy did me much 
good. Blessed days of cheapness and good quality, before 
chicory, the accursed poison, had found its way into coffee, 
or oleomargarine was invented, or all things canned — the 
world will never see ye more ! I have now lived for many 
months in a first-class Florence hotel, and in all the time 
have not tasted one fresh Italian mushroom, or truffle, or 
olive — nothing but tasteless abominations bottled in France ! 

It was settled that my cousin should return from Mar- 
seilles to the United States, while I was to go on alone to 
Italy. It was misgivingly predicted at home by divers friends 
that I would be as a lamb set loose among wolves, and lose 
all my money at the outstart. Could they have learned that 
within a week after my arrival I had been regarded by 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 121 

Spanish smugglers as a brother, and tripped up a spy of the 
police, and been promised a situation as a slaver's and pirate's 
assistant, they might have thought that I had begun to learn 
how to take care of myself in a huny. As for losing my 
money, I, by a terrible accident, douUed it, as I will here 
describe. 

Before leaving home, a lady cousin had made for Samuel 
and me each a purse, and they were exactly alike. Xow by 
a purse I mean a real purse, and not a pocket-book, or a 
porte-monnaie, or a wallet — that is, I mean a long bag with 
a slit and two rings, and nothing else. And my cousin 
having often scolded me for leaving, mine lying about in our 
room, I seeing it, as I thought, just a few minutes before my 
departure, lying on the table, pocketed it, thanking God that 
Sam had not found it, or scolded me. 

I went on board the steamboat and set sail towards Italy. 
I was sea-sick all night, but felt better the next day. Then 
I had to pay out some money, and thought I would look over 
my gold. To my utter amazement, it was doubled ! This 
I attributed to great generosity on Sam's part, and I blessed 
him. 

But, merciful heavens ! what were my sensations at find- 
ing in the lower depth of my pocket another purse also filled 
with Napoleons in rouleaux ! Then it all flashed upon me. 
Samuel, the careful, had left Ms purse lying on the table, and 
I had supposed it was mine ! I felt as wretched as if I had 
lost instead of won. 

When I got to Naples I found a letter from my cousin 
bewailing his loss. He implored me, if I knew nothing 
about it, not to tell it to a human soul. There was a M. 
Duclaux in Marseilles, with whom we had had our business 
dealings, and from him Sam had borrowed what he needed. 
I at once requested Captain Olive, of the steamer, to convey 
the purse and its contents to M. Duclaux, which I suppose 
was done secundem ordinem. 

Poor Sam ! I never met him again. He died of con- 



122 MEMOIRS. 

sumption soon after returning home. He was one of whom 
I can say with truth that I never saw in him a fault, however 
trifling. He was honour itself in everything, as humane as 
was his grandfather before him, ever cheerful and kind, 
merry and quaint. 

The programme of the steamboat declared that meals 
were included in the fare, " except while stopping at a port." 
But we stopped every day at Genoa or Leghorn, or some- 
where, and stayed about fifteen hours, and as almost every 
passenger fell sea-sick after going ashore, the meals were not 
many. On board the first day, I made the acquaintance of 
Mr. James Temple Bowdoin, of Boston, and Mr. Mosely, of 
whom I had often heard as editor of the Richmond Whig. 
Mr. Bowdoin was a nephew of Lady Temple, and otherwise 
widely connected with English families. He is now living 
(1892), and I have seen a great deal of him of late years. 
With these two I joined company, and travelled with them 
over Italy. Both were much older than I, and experienced 
men of the world ; therefore I was in good hands, and better 
guides, philosophers, mentors, pilots, and friends I could 
hardly have found. Left to myself, I should probably ere 
the winter was over have been the beloved chief of a gang of 
gypsies, or brigands, or witches, or careering the wild sea- 
wave as a daring smuggler, all in innocence and goodness of 
heart ; for truly in Marseilles I had begun to put forth buds 
of such strange kind and promise as no friend of mine ever 
dreamed of. As it was, I got into better, if less picturesque, 
society. 

We came to Naples, and went to a hotel, and visited 
everything. In those days the beggars and pimps and pick- 
pockets were beyond all modern conception. The pictur- 
esqueness of the place and people were only equalled by the 
stinks. It was like a modern realistic novel. We went a 
great deal to the opera, also to the Blue Grotto of Capri, and 
ascended Mount Vesuvius, and sought Baiae, and made, in 
fact, all the excursions. As there were three, and sometimes 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 123 

half-a-dozen of our friends on these trips, we had, naturally, 
with us quite a cortege. Among these was an ill-favoured 
rascal called " John," who always received a dollar a day. 
One evening some one raised the question as to what the 
devil it was that John did. He did not carry anything, or 
work to any account, or guide, or inform, yet he was always 
there, and always in the way. So John, being called up, was 
asked what he did. Great was his indignation, for by this 
time he had got to consider himself indispensable. He de- 
clared that he " directed, and made himself generally useful." 
We informed him that we would do our own directing, and 
regarded him as generally useless. So John was discarded. 
Since then I have found that " John " is a very frequent in- 
gredient in all societies and Government offices. There are 
Johns in Parliament, in the army, and in the Church. His 
children are pensioned into the third and fourth and fortieth 
generation. In fact, I am not sure that John is not the 
great social question of the age. 

There was in Philadelphia an Academy of Fine Arts, or 
Gallery, of which my father had generously presented me 
with two shares, which gave me free entrance. There were 
in it many really excellent pictures, even a first-class Murillo, 
besides Wests and Allstons. Unto this I had, as was my 
wont, read up closely, and reflected much on what I read, so 
that I was to a certain degree prepared for the marvels of art 
which burst on me in Naples. And if I was, and always have 
been, rather insensible to the merits of Eenaissance sculpture 
and architecture, I was not so to* its painting, and not at all 
blind to the unsurpassed glories of its classic prototypes. 
Professor Dodd had indeed impressed it deeply and specially 
on my mind that the revival of a really pure Greek taste in 
England, or from the work of Stewart and Revett, was con- 
temporary with that for Gothic architecture, and that the 
appreciation of one, if true^ implies that of the other. As I 
was now fully inspired with my new resolution to become an 
architect, I read all that I could get on the subject, and 



124 MEMOIRS. 

naturally examined all remains of the past far more closely 
and critically than I should otherwise have done. And this 
again inspired in me (who always had a mania for bric-a-brac 
and antiquity, which is certainly hereditary) a great interest 
in the characteristic decoration of different ages, which thing 
is the soul and life of all aesthetic archaeology and the minor 
arts ; which latter again I truly claim to have brought, I may 
say, into scientific form and made a branch of education in 
after years. 

I think that we were a month in Naples. I kept a 
journal then, and indeed everywhere for three years after. 
The reader may be thankful that I have it not, for I foresee 
that I shall easily recall enough to fill ten folios of a thou- 
sand pages solid brevier each, at this rate of reminiscences. 
As my predilection for everything German and Gothic came 
out more strongly every da}^, Mr. Mosely called me familiarly 
Germanicus, a name which was indeed not ill-bestowed at 
that period. 

From Naples we went to Rome by vettura^ or in car- 
riages. We were two days and two nights on the route. I 
remember that when we entered Rome, I saw the douanier 
who examined my trunk remove from it, as he thought un- 
perceived, a hair-brush, book, &c.,and slyly hide them behind 
another trunk. I calmly walked round, retook and replaced 
them in my trunk, to the discomfiture, but not in the least to 
the shame, of the thief, who only grinned. 

And here I may say, once for all, that one can hardly 
fail to have a mean opinion of human common-sense in gov- 
ernment, when we see this system of examining luggage still 
maintained. For all that any country could possibly lose by 
smuggling in trunks, &c., would be a hundred-fold recom- 
pensed by the increased amount of travel and money im- 
ported, should it be done away with, as has been perfectly 
and fully proved in France ; the announcement a year ago 
that examination would be null or formal having had at once 
the effect of greatly increasing travel. And as there is not a 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 125 

custom-house in all Europe where a man who knows the 
trick cannot pull through his luggage by bribery — the excep- 
tions being miraculously rare — the absurdity and folly of the 
system is apparent. 

We went to the Hotel d'Allemagne, where I fell ill, either 
because I had a touch of Neapolitan malaria in me (in those 
days the stench of the city was perceptible three miles out at 
sea, and might have risen unto heaven above and been smelt 
by the angels, had they and their home been as near to earth 
as was believed by the schoolmen), or because the journey 
had been too much for me. However, an English physician 
set me up all right in two or three days (he wanted to sell us 
pictures which would have cured any one — of a love of art), 
and then there began indeed a glorious scampering and in- 
vestigating, rooting and rummaging — 

" 'Mid deathless lairs in solemn Rome." 

Galleries and gardens, ruins and palaces, Colosseum and 
temples, churches and museums — ye have had many a better 
informed and many a more inspired or gifted visitor than I, 
but whether from your first Sabine days you ever had a hap- 
pier one, or one who enjoyed you more with the simple en- 
joyment of youth and hope gratified, I doubt. Sometimes 
among moss-grown arches on a sunny day, as the verd-an- 
tique lizards darted over the stones from dark to light, while 
far in the distance tinkled bells, either from cows or con- 
vents, and all was calm and sweet, I have often wondered if 
it could indeed be real and not a dream. Life often seemed 
to me then to be too good to be true. And there was this at 
least good in my Transcendentalism and Poly-Pantheism, 
that it quite unconsciously or silently gave me many such 
hours ; for it had sunk so deeply into my soul, and was so 
much a real part thereof, that it inspired me when I never 
thought of it, in which I differed by a heaven's width from 
the professional Yankee Transcendentalists, Presbyterians, 
Methodists, Esthetes, and other spiritualists or sorcerers, 



126 MEMOIRS. 

who always kept their blessed belief, as a holy fugleman, full 
in sight, to give them sacred straight tips, or as a Star-span- 
gled Bannerman who waved exceedingly, while my spirit 
was a shy fairy, who dwelt far down in the depths of the all 
too green sea of my soul, where it seemed to me she had ever 
been, or ever a storm had raised a wave on the surface. An- 
tiquely verdant green I was, no doubt. And even to this day 
the best hours of my life are when I hear her sweet voice 
'mid ivy greens or ruins grey, in wise books, hoar traditions. 
Be it where it will, it is that^ and not the world of men or 
books, which gives the charm. 

It was usual for all who drew from Torlonia's bank not 
less than £20 to be invited to his soirees. To ensure the 
expenses, the footman who brought the invitation called the 
day after for not less than five francs. But the entertain- 
ment was well worth the money, and more. There was a 
good supper — Thackeray has represented a character in 
" Vanity Fair " as devouring it — and much amusement. 

Now I had written my name CA«s., which being mistaken 
for Cliev.., I in due time received an invitation addressed to 
M. le Chevalier Godfrey de Leland. And it befell that I 
once found a lost decoration of the Order of the Golden 
Spur, which in those days n^as actually sold to anybody who 
asked for it for ten pounds, and was worth " nothing to no- 
body." This caused much fun among my friends, and from 
that day I was known as the Chevalier Germanicus, or the 
Knight of the Golden Spur, to which I assented with very 
good grace as a joke. There were even a few who really 
believed that I had been decorated, though I never wore it, 
and one day I received quite a severe remonstrance from a 
very patriotic fellow-countryman against the impropriety of 
my thus risking my loss of citizenship. "Which caused me 
to reflect how many there are in life who rise to such " hon- 
ours," Heaven only knows how, in a back-stairs way. I know 
in London a very great man of science, nemini sectmdus, 
who has never been knighted, although the tradesman who 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 127 

makes for him his implements and instruments has received 
the title and the accolade. Fie at justitia ! 

I saw at one of the Torlonia entertainments a marvel- 
lously beautiful and strange thins:, of which I had read an 
account in Mme. de Stael's Corinne. There was a stage, on 
which appeared a young girl, plainly dressed, and bearing a 
simple small scarf. She did not speak or dance, or even as- 
sume " artistic positions " ; what she did was far more strik- 
ing and wonderful. She merely sat or stood or reclined in 
many ways, every one of which seemed to be 2^erfectly natu- 
^ ral or habitual, and all of which were incredibly graceful. I 
have forgotten how such women were called in Italy. I am 
sure that this one had never been trained to it, for the 
absolute ease and naturalness with which she sat or stood 
could never have been taught. If it could, every woman in 
the world would learn it. Eistori was one of these instinct- 
ive Graces^ and it constituted nearly all the art there was in 
her. 

This was in 1846. The Carnival of that year in Rome 
was the last real one which Italy ever beheld. It was the 
very last, for which every soul saved up all his money for 
months, in order to make a wild display, and dance and 
revel and indulge in 

" Eating, drinking, masking, 
And other things which could be had for asking." 

Then all Rome ran mad, and rode in carriages full of 
flowers, or carts, or wheelbarrows, or triumphal chariots, or 
on camels, horses, asses, or rails — 7i^im20orte quoi — and merri- 
ly cast confetti of flour or lime at one another laughing, 
while grave English tourists on balconies laboriously poured 
the same by the peck from tin scoops on the heads of the 
multitude, under the delusion that they too were enjoying 
themselves and " doing " the Carnival properly. It was the 
one great rule among Italians that no man should in the 
Carnival, under any provocation whatever, lose his temper. 
And here John Bull often tripped up. On the last night of 



123 MEMOIRS. 

the last Carnival — that great night — there was the Senza 
Moccolo or extinguishment of lights, in which ever3'body 
bore a burning taper, and tried to blow or knock out the 
light of his neighbour. Now, being tall, I held my taper 
high with one hand, well out of danger, while with a broad 
felt hat in the other I extinguished the children of light like 
a priest. I threw myself into all the roaring fun like a wild 
boy, as I was, and was never so jolly. Observing a pretty 
young English lady in an open carriage, I thrice extin- 
guished her light, at which she laughed, but at which her 
brother or beau did not, for he got into a great rage, even 
the first time, and bade me begone. Whereupon I promptly 
renewed the attack, and then repeated it, " according to the 
rules of the game," whereat he began to curse and swear, 
when I, in the Italian fashion of rebuke (to the delight of 
sundry Italians), pointed my finger at him and hissed ; 
which constituted the winning point dlionneur in the game. 

There, too, was the race of wild horses, right down 
through the Corso or Condotti, well worth seeing, and very 
exciting, and game suppers o'nights after the opera, and the 
meeting with many swells and noted folk, and now it all 
seems like some memory of a wild phantasmagoria or hur- 
ried magic-lantern show — galleries and ruins by day, and 
gaiety by night. Even so do all the scenes of life roll up 
together at its end, often getting mixed. 

Yet another Eoman memory or two. We had taken 
lodgings in the Via Condotti, where we had a nice sitting- 
room in common and a good coal-fire. Our landlady was 
lady-like and spoke French, and had long been a governess 
in the great Borghese family. As for her husband, there 
were thousands of Liberals far and ivide who spoke of him 
as the greatest scoundrel unhung, for he was at the head of 
the Roman police, and I verily believe knew more iniquity 
than the Pope himself. It would have been against all na- 
ture and precedent if I had not become his dear friend and 
protege^ which I did accordingly, for I liked him very much 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 129 

indeed, and Heaven knows that siicli a rum couple of friends 
as Giuseppe Navone and myself, when out walking together, 
could not at that time have been found in Europe. 

It may here be observed that I was decidedly getting on 
in the quality of my Mentors, for, as regarded morals and 
humanity, my old pirate and slaver friend was truly as a 
lamb and an angel of light compared to Navone. And I 
will further indicate, as this book will prove, that if I was 
not at the age of twenty-three the most accomplished young 
scoundrel in all Europe, it was not for want of such magnifi- 
cent opportunities and friends as few men ever enjoyed. But 
it was always my fate to neglect or to be unable to profit by 
advantages, as, for instance, in mathematics ; nor in dishon- 
esty did I succeed one whit better, which may be the reason 
why the two are somehow dimly connected in my mind. 
Here I think I see the unfathomable smile in the eye of 
Professor Dodd (it never got down to his lips), who was the 
incarnate soul of purity and honour. But then the banker, 
E. Fenzi, who swindled me out of nearly 500 francs, was an 
arithmetician, and I write under a sense of recent wrong. 
How this loss, and Fenzi's failure, flight, and the fuss which 
it all caused in Florence, were accurately foretold me by a 
witch, may be read in detail in my " Etrusco-Roman Ee- 
mains in Tiiscan Tradition." London : T. Fisher Unwin. 

My landlady was a very zealous Catholic, and tried to con- 
vert me. This was a new experience, and I enjoyed it. I 
proved malleable. So she called in a Jesuit priest to perfect 
the work. I listened with deep interest to his worn-out fade 
arguments, made a few points of feeble objection for form's 
sake, yielded, and met him more than half way. But some- 
how he never called again. Latet anguis i7i lierha — my 
grass was rather too green, I suppose. I was rather sorry, 
for I expected some amusement. But I had been too deep 
for the Jesuit — and for myself. 

The time came for my departure. I was to go alone on 
to Florence, in advance of my friends. Navone arranged 



130 MEMOIRS. 

everything nicely for me : I was to go by diligence on to 
Civita Vecchia, where I was to call on a relative of his, who 
kept a bric-a-brac shop. I did not know how or why it was 
that I was treated with such great respect, as if with fear, by 
the conductor, and by all on the road. I was en route all 
night, and in the morning, very weary, I went to a hotel, 
called a commissionaire, and bade him get my passport from 
the police, and have it vis.ee^ and secure me a passage on the 
boat to Leghorn. He returned very soon, and said with an 
air of bewilderment, " Signore, you sent me on a useless 
errand. Here is your passport put all en regie, and your pas- 
sage is all secured ! " 

I saw it at once. The kind fatherly care of the great 
and good Navone had done it all ! He had watched over me 
invisibly and mysteriously all the time during the night ; on 
the road I was a pet child of the Eoman police ! The Vehm- 
gericht had endorsed me with three crosses ! Therefore the 
passport and the passage were all right, and the captain was 
very deferential, and I got to Florence safely. 

In Florence I went to the first hotel, which was then in 
what is now known as the Palazzo Feroni, or Viesseux's, the 
great circulating library of Italy. It is a fine machicolated 
building, which was in the Middle Ages the prison of the 
Republic. From my window I had a fine view of the Via 
Tornabuoni — in which I had coffee since I concluded the 
last line. There were but three or four persons the first 
evening at the tahle-cVlwte. One was a very beautiful Polish 
countess, who spoke French perfectly. She was very fascinat- 
ing, and, when she ate a salad, smeared her lovely mouth and 
cheeks all round with oil to her ears. Some one said some- 
thing to her about the manner in which the serfs were 
treated in Poland, whereupon she replied with great vivacity 
that the Polish serfs were even more degraded and barbarous 
than those of Russia. Which remark inspired in me certain 
reflections, which were amply developed in after years by the 
perusal of Von Moltke's work on Poland, and more recently 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 131 

of that very interesting novel called " Tlie Deluge." If free- 
dom shrieked when Kosciusko fell, it was probably, from a 
humanitarian point of view, with joy. 

There was, however, at the same hotel a singular man, a 
Lithuanian Pole named Andrekovitch, with whom I became 
very intimate, and whom I met in after years in Paris and in 
America. He had been at a German university, where he 
had imbibed most liberal and revolutionary ideas. He subse- 
quently took part in one or two revolutions, and was exiled. 
He had read about Emerson in a French magazine, and was 
enthusiastic over him. In strange contrast to him was a 
handsome young man from the Italian Tyrol, who was, like 
the Pole and myself, full of literary longings, but who was 
still quite a Roman Catholic. He knew about as much, or as 
little, of the world as I did, and was " gentle and bland." 
When we bade farewell, he wept, and kissed me. Andreko- 
vitch was eccentric, wild, and Slavonian-odd to look at at any 
time. One evening he came into my room clad in scarlet 
dressing-gown, and having altogether the appearance of a 
sorcerer just out of a Sabbat. The conversation took a theo- 
logical turn. Andrekovitch was the ragged remnant of a 
Catholic, but a very small one. He sailed close to the wind, 
and neared Rationalism. 

" But the Pope ! . . ." exclaimed the Tyrolese. 

Andrekovitch rose, looking more sorcerer or Zamiel-like 

than ever, and exclaiming, " The Pope be ! " left the 

room. The last word was lost in the slam of the door. It 
was a melodramatic departure, and as such has ever been im- 
pressed on my memory. 

My father, while a merchant, and also my uncle, had done 
a very large business in Florentine straw goods, and I had 
received letters to several English houses who had corre- 
sponded with them. I heard, long after, that my arrival had 
caused a small panic in Florence in business circles, it being 
apprehended that I had come out to establish a rival branch, 
or to buy at head-quarters for the American " straw-market." 



132 MEMOIRS. 

I believe that their fears were appeased when I interviewed 
them. One of these worthy men had been so long in Italy 
that he had caught a little of its superstition. He wished to 
invest in lottery tickets, and asked me for lucky numbers, 
which I gave him. 

As I write these lines in Florence, I have within half-an- 
hour called for the first time on an old witch or strega^ whom 
I found surrounded by herbs and bottles, and a magnificent 
cat, who fixed his eyes on me all the time, as if he recognised 
a friend. I found, however, that she only knew the common 
vulgar sorceries, and was unable to give me any of the higher 
scongiurazioni or conjurations ; and as I left, the old sorceress 
said respectfully and admiringly, " You come to me to learn, 
Maestro, but it is fitter that I take lessons from you ! " 
Then she asked me for " the wizard blessing," which I gave 
her in Eomany. So my first and last experiences in the deep 
and dark art come together ! 

I became acquainted in Florence with Hiram Powers, 
which reminds me that I once in Rome dined vis-a-vis to 
Gibson and several other artists, with whom I became inti- 
mate as young men readily do. I contrived to study archi- 
tecture, and made myself very much at home in a few studios. 
The magnificent Fiorara^ or flower-girl, whom so many will 
remember for many years, was then in the full bloom of her 
beauty. She and others gave flowers to any strangers whom 
they met, not expecting money down, but when a man de- 
parted the flower-girls were always on hand to solicit a gratu- 
ity. Twenty years later this same Fiorara, still a very hand- 
some woman, remembered me, and gave my wife a handsome 
bouquet on leaving. 

I studied Provencal and Italian poetry in illuminated 
MSS. in the Ambrosian or Laurentian Library, and took my 
coffee at Doney's, and saw more of Florence in a few weeks' 
time than I have ever done since in any one of my residences 
here, though some of them have been for six and nine months. 
As is quite natural. Who that lives in London ever goes to 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. I33 

see the Tower ? All tilings in Europe were so new and fresh 
and beautiful and wonderful to me then, and I had been 
yearning for them so earnestly for so many years, and this 
golden freedom followed so closely on the deadly ennui of 
Princeton, that I could never see enough. 

If any of my readers want to know something of sorcery, 
I can tell them that among its humblest professors it is per- 
fectly understood that pleasure or enjoyment is one of its 
deepest mysteries or principles, as an integral part of fascina- 
tion. So I can feel an enclimitment^ sometimes almost in- 
credible, in gazing on a Gothic ruin in sunshine, or a beautiful 
face, a picture by Carpaccio, N"orse interlaces, lovable old books, 
my amethyst amulet, or a garden. For if you could sway 
life and death, and own millions, or walk invisible, you could 
do no more than enjoij ; therefore you had better learn to en- 
joy much without such power. Thus endeth the first lesson ! 

I arrived in Venice. There had been a time in America 
when, if I could have truthfully declared that I had ever 
been in a gondola, I should have felt as if I held a diploma 
of nobility in the Grand Order of Cosmopolites. Having 
been conveyed in one to my hotel on the Grand Canal, I felt 
that I at last held it ! Now I had really mastered the three 
great cities of Italy, v/hich was the first and greatest part of 
all travel in all the world of culture and of art. Fate might 
hurl me back to America, or even into New Jersey, but I had 
"swum in a gondola." 

I very soon made the acquaintance of two brothers from 
New York named Seymour, somewhat older than myself, 
and men of reading and culture. With them I " sight-saw " 
the city. I had read Venice up rather closely at Princeton, 
and had formed a great desire to go on the Bridge of Sighs. 
For some reason this was then very strictly forbidden. Our 
Consul, who was an enterprising young man, told me that he 
had been for months trying to effect it in vain. It at once 
became apparent to me as a piece of manifest destiny that I 

must do it. 

7 



134 MEMOIRS. 

One day I had with me a clever fellow, a commissionaire 
or guide, and consulted him. He said, " I think it may be 
done. You look like an Austrian, and may be taken for an 
officer. Walk boldly into the chief's office, and ask for the 
keys of the bridge ; only show a little cheek. You may get 
them. Give the chief's man two francs when you come out. 
At the worst, he can only refuse to give them." 

It was indeed a very cheeky undertaking, but I ventured 
on it with the calmness of innocence. I went into thn office, 
and said, " The keys to the bridge, if you please ! " as if I 
were in an official hurry on State business. The official 
stared, and said — 

" Do I understand that you formally demand the keys ? " 
" Ja wohly certainly ; at once, if you please ! " 
They were handed over to me, and I saw the bridge and 
gave the two francs, and all was well. But it gave me no re- 
nown in Venice, for the Consul and all my friends regarded 
it as a fabulous joke of mine, inspired by poetic genius. But 
I sometimes think that the official who yielded up the keys, 
and the man whom he sent with me, and perhaps the com- 
missionaire, all had a put-up job of it among them on those 
keys, and several glasses all round out of those two francs. 
Quien sahe? Vive la bagatelle ! 

We went on an excursion to Padua. What I remember 
is, that what impressed me most was a placard here and there 
announcing that a work on Oken had just appeared ! This 
rather startled me. Whether it was for or against the great 
German offshoot from Schelling, it proved that somebody in 
Italy had actually studied him ! Eppure si muove, I thought. 
It cannot be true that — 

" Padua ! the lamp of learning 
In thy halls no more is burning." 

I have been there several times since. All that I now 
recall is that the hotel was not very good the last time. 

I met in Venice a young New Yorker named Clark, who 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 135 

had crossed with me on the ship. He was a merry compan- 
ion. Sailing with him one morning in a gondola along the 
Grand Canal, we saw sitting before a hotel its porter, who 
was an unmistakable American man of full colour. Great 
was Clark's delight, and he called out, " I say. Buck ! what 
the devil are you doing here ? " 

With a delighted grin, the man and brother replied in 
deep Southern accent — 

" Dey sets me hyar fo' a bait to 'tice de Americans with." 

I heard subsequently that he had come from America 
with his mistress, and served her faithfully till there came 
into the service a pretty French girl. Great was the anger 
of the owner of the man to find that he had unmistakably 
" enticed " the maid. To which he replied that it was a free 
country ; that he had married the damsel — she was his wife ; 
and so the pair at once packed up and departed. 

We used to hear a great deal before the war from South- 
erns about the devotion of their slaves, but there were a great 
many instances in which the fidelity did not exactly hold 
water. There was an old Virginia gentleman who owned 
one of these faithful creatures. He took him several times 
to the North, and as the faithful one always turned a deaf 
ear to the Abolitionists, and resisted every temptation to de- 
part, and refused every free-ticket offered for a journey on 
" the underground railway," and went back to Eichmond, he 
was of course trusted to an unlimited extent. When the 
war ended he was freed. Some one asked him one day how 
he could have been such a fool as to remain a slave. He 
replied — 

" Kase it paid. Dere's nuffin pays like being a dewoted 
darkey. De las' time I went Norf wid massa I made 'nuff 
out of him to buy myself free twice't over." 

Doubtless there were many instances of "pampered and 
petted " household servants who had grown up in families 
who had sense to know that they could never live free in the 
freezing North without hard work. These were the only 



136 MEMOIRS. 

devoted ones of whom I ever heard. The field-hands, dis- 
ciplined by the lash, and liable to have their wives or chil- 
dren or relatives sold from them — as happened on an average 
once at least in a life — were all to a man quite ready to for- 
sake " ole massa " and " dear ole missus," and flee unto free- 
dom. And what a vile mean wretch any man must be who 
would sacrifice his freedom to any other living being, be it 
for love or feudal fidelity — and what a villain must the man 
be who would accept such a gift ! 

I had never thought much of this subject before I left 
home. I did not like slavery, nor to think about it. But in 
Europe I did like such thought, and I returned fully im- 
pressed with the belief that slavery was, as Charles Sumner 
said, " the sum of all crim.es." In which summation he 
showed himself indeed a " sumner," as it was called of yore. 
Which cost me many a bitter hour and much sorrow, for 
there was hardly a soul whom I knew, except my mother, to 
whom an Abolitionist was not simply the same thing as a 
disgraceful, discreditable malefactor. Even my father, when 
angry with me one day, could think of nothing bitterer than 
to tell me that I knew I was an Aholitionist. I kept it to 
myself, but the reader can have no idea of what I was made 
to suffer for years in Philadelphia, where everything South- 
ern was exalted and worshipped with a baseness below that 
of the blacks themselves. 

For all of which in after years I had full and complete 
recompense. I lived to see the young ladies who were ready 
to kneel before any man who owned " sla-iives," detest the 
name of " South," and to learn that their fathers and friends 
were battling to the death to set those slaves free. I lived to 
see the roof of the " gentlemanly planter," who could not of 
yore converse a minute with me without letting me know 
that he considered himself as an immeasurably higher being 
than myself, blaze over his head amid yell and groan and 
sabre- stroke — 

" And death-shots flying thick and fast," 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 137 

while he fled for life, and the freed slaves sang hymns of joy 
to God. I saw the roads, five miles wide, level, barren, and 
crossed with ruts, where Northern and Southern armies 
had marched, and where villages and plantations had once 
been. I saw countless friends or acquaintances, who had once 
smiled with pitying scorn at me, or delicately turned the con- 
versation when Abolition was mentioned in my presence, be- 
come all at once blatant " nigger-worshippers," abundant in 
proof that they had always had " an indescribable horror of 
slavery " — it was, in fact, so indescribable that (until it was 
evident that the North would conquer) none of them ever 
succeeded in giving anybody the faintest conception of it, or 
any idea that it existed. I can still recall how gingerly and 
cautiously — " paw by paw into the water " — these dough- 
faces became hard-baked Abolitionists, far surpassing us of 
the Old Guard in zeal. I lived to see men who had voted 
against Grant and reviled him become his most intimate 
friends. But enough of such memories. It is characteristic 
of the American people that, while personally very vindictive, 
they forgive and forget political offences far more amicably 
— very far — than do even the English. However, in the case 
of the Rebellion, this was a very easy thing for those to do 
who had not, like us old Abolitionists, borne the burden and 
heat of the day, and who, coming in at the eleventh hour, 
got all the contracts and offices! It never came into the 
head of any man to write a Dictionnaire des Girouettes in 
America. These late converts had never known what it was 
to be Abolitionists while it was " unfashionable," and have, 
as it were, live coals laid on the quivering heart — as I had a 
thousand times during many years — all for believing the tre- 
mendous and plain truth that slavery was a thousand times 
wickeder than the breach of all the commandments put to- 
gether. It was so peculiar for any man, not a Unitarian or 
Quaker, to be an Abolitionist in Philadelphia from 1848 
until 1861, that such exceptions were pointed out as if they 
had been Chinese — " and d d bad Chinese at that," as a 



138 MEMOIRS. 

friend added to whom I made the remark. So much for 
man's relations witli poor humanity. 

My old friend, B. P. Hunt, was one of these few excep- 
tions. His was a very strange experience. After ceasing to 
edit a " selected " magazine, he went to and fro for many 
voyages to Haiti, where, singular as it may seem, his experi- 
ences of the blacks made of him a stern Abolitionist. He 
married a connection of mine, and lived comfortably in 
Philadelphia, I think, until the eighties. 

I travelled with Mr. Clark from Venice to Milan, where 
we made a short visit. I remember an old soldier who spoke 
six languages, who was cicerone of the roof of the Cathedral, 
and whom I found still on the roof twenty years later, and 
still speaking the same six tongues. I admired the building 
as a beautiful fancy, exquisitely decorated, but did not think 
much of it as a specimen of Gothic architecture. It is the 
best test of aesthetic culture and knowledge in the world. 
When you hear anybody praise it as the most exquisite or 
perfect Gothic cathedral in existence, you may expect to hear 
the critic admire the designs of Chippendale furniture or the 
decoration of St. Peter's. 

So we passed through beautiful Lombardy and came to 
Domo d'Ossola, where a strange German-Italian patois was 
spoken. It was in the middle of April, and we were warned 
that it would be very dangerous to cross the Simplon, but we 
went on all night in a carriage on sleigh-runners, through 
intervals of snowstorm. Now and then we came to rushing 
mountain-torrents bursting over the road ; far away, ever and 
anon, we heard the roar of a lauwine or avalanche ; some- 
times I looked out, and could see straight down below me a 
thousand feet into an abyss or on a headlong stream. We 
entered the great tunnel directly from another, for the snow 
lay twenty feet deep on the road, and a passage had been 
dug under it for several hundred feet, and so two tunnels 
were connected. Just in the worst of the road beyond, and 
in the bitterest cold, we met a sleigh, in which were an Eng- 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 139 

lisli gentleman and a very beautiful young lady, apparently 
his daughter, going to Italy. " I saw her but an instant, yet 
methinks I see her now " — a sweet picture in a strange scene. 
Poets used to " me-think " and " me-seem " more in those 
days, but we endured it. Then in the morning we saw 
Brieg, far down below us in the valley in green leaves and 
sunshine, and when we got there then I realised that we 
were in a new land. 

We had a great giant of a German conductor, who seemed 
to regard Clark and me as under his special care. Once when 
we had wandered afar to look at something, and it was time 
for the stage or EiUuagen to depart, he hunted us up, scolded 
us " like a Dutch uncle " in German, and drove us along be- 
fore him like two bad boj^s to the diligence, " pawing up " 
first one and then the other, after which, shoving us in, he 
banged and locked the door with a grunt of satisfaction, even 
as the Giant Blunderbore locked the children in the coffer 
after slamming down the lid. Across the scenes and shades 
of forty years, that picture of the old conductor driving us 
like two unruly urchins back to school rises, never to be for- 
gotten. 

We went by mountains and lakes and Gothic towns, rocks, 
forests, old chateaux, and rivers— the road was wild in those 
days— till we came to Geneva. Thence Clark went his way 
to Paris, and I remained alone for a week. I had, it is true, 
a letter of introduction to a very eminent Presbyterian Swiss 
clergyman, so I sent it in with my card. His wife came out 
on the balcony, looked coolly down at me, and concluding, I 
suppose from my appearance, that I was one of the ungodly, 
went in and sent out word that her husband was out, and 
would be gone for an indefinite period, and that she was en- 
gaged. The commissionaire who was with me — poor devil ! 
—was dreadfully mortified ; but I was not very much aston- 
ished, and, indeed, I was treated in much the same manner, 
or worse, by a colleague of this pious man in Paris, or rather 
by his wife. 



140 MExMOmS. 

I believe that what kept me a week in Geneva was the 
white wine and trout. At the end of the time I set out to 
the north, and on the way met with some literary or profes- 
sional German, who commended to me the " Pfisterer-Zunf t " 
or Bakers' Guild as a cheap and excellent hostelry. And it 
was curious enough, in all conscience. During the Middle 
Ages, and down to a very recent period, the Zilnfte or trade- 
guilds in the Swiss cities carried it with a high hand. Even 
the gentlemen could only obtain rights as citizens by enroll- 
ing themselves as the trade of aristocrats. I had heard of 
the boy who thought he would like to be bound apprentice 
to the king ; in Berne he might have been entered for a 
lower branch of the business. These guilds had their own 
local taverns, inns, or Herdergs^ where travelling colleagues 
of the calling might lodge at moderate rates, but nobody else. 
However, as time rolled by, these Zimfte or guild-lodgings 
were opened to strangers. One of the last which did so was 
that of the Pfister or bakers (Latin, pistor)^ and this had 
only been done a few weeks ere I went there. As a literary 
man whom I met on the ramparts said to me, " That place 
is still strong in the Middle Age." It was a quaint old 
building, and to get to my room I had to cross the great 
guild-hall of the Ancient and Honourable Society of Bakers. 
There were the portraits of all the Grand Masters of the 
Order from the fourteenth or fifteenth century on the walls, 
and the concentrated antique tobacco-smoke of as many ages 
in the air, which, to a Princeton graduate, was no more than 
the scent of a rose to a bee. 

I could speak a little German — not much — but the degree 
to which I felt, sympathised with, and understood everything 
Deutsch, passeth all words and all mortal belief. Sit verho 
venial But I do not believe that any human being ever 
crossed the frontier who had thought himself down, or rather 
raised himself up, into Teutonism as I had on so slight a 
knowledge of the language, even as a spider thro we th up an 
invisible thread on high, and then travels on it. Which 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 141 

thing was perceived marvellously soon, and not without some 
amazement, by the Germans, who have all at least this one 
point in common with Savages, Xew Jerseymen, Red Indians, 
Negroes, Gypsies, and witches, that they by mystic sympathy 
hnotu those toJio like tJiem^ and take to them accordingly, 
guided by some altogether inexplicable clue or Hexengarn^ 
^ even as deep calleth unto deep and star answereth star with- 
out a voice. Whence it was soon observed at Heidelberg by 
an American student that " Leland would abuse the Dutch 
all day long if he saw fit, but never allowed anybody else to 
do so." The which thing, as I think, argues the very ne 
plus ultra of sympathy. 

I found my way to Strasburg, where I went to the tip-top 
outside of the cathedral, and took the railway train for Hei- 
delberg. And here I had an adventure, which, though trifling 
to the last degree, was to me such a great and new experience 
that I will describe it, let the reader think what he will. I 
went naturally enough first-class, so uncommon a thing then 
in Germany that people were wont to say that only princes. 
Englishmen, and asses did so. There entered the same car- 
riage a very lady-like and pretty woman. The guard, seeing 
this, concluded that — whatever he concluded, he carefully 
drew down all the curtains, looking at me with a cheerful, 
genial air of intense mystery, as if to say, " I twig ; it's all 
right ; I'll keep your secret." 

It is a positive fact that all this puzzled me amazingly. 
There were many things in which I, the friend and pupil of 
Navone, was as yet as innocent as a babe unborn. The lady 
seemed to be amused — as well she might. Sancta simplici- 
tas ! I asked her why the conductor had drawn the cur- 
tains. She laughed, and explained that he possibly thought 
we were a bridal pair or lovers. Common sense and ordi- 
nary politeness naturally inspired the reply that I wished we 
were, which declaration was so amiably received that I sug- 
gested the immediate institution of such an arrangement. 
Which was so far favourably received that it was sealed with 



1J^2 MEMOIRS. 

a kiss. However, the seal was not broken. I think the lady 
must have been very much amused. It is not without due 
reflection that 1 record this. Kissing went for very little in 
Germany in those days. It was about as common in Vienna 
as shaking hands. But this was my first experience in it. 
So I record it, because it seems as if some benevolent fairy 
had welcomed me to Germany ; it took place just as we. 
crossed the frontier. However, I found out some time after, 
by a strange accident, that my fairy was the wife of a banker 
who lived beyond Heidelberg ; and at Heidelberg I left her 
and went to the first hotel in the town. 

I had formed no plans, and had no letters to anybody. I 
had read Howitt's " Student Life in Germany " through and 
through, so I thought I would study in Heidelberg. But 
how to begin ? That was the question. I went into a shop 
and bought some cigars. There I consulted with the shop- 
keeper as to what I should do. Could he refer me to some 
leading authority in the University, known to him, who 
would give me advice ? He could, and advised me to consult 
with the Fed ell Oapelmann. 

Now I didn't know it, but Pedell — meaning beadle, com- 
monly called Poodle by the students — was the head-constable 
of the University. In honest truth I supposed he must be 
the President or Pro-Rector. So I went to Pedell Capel- 
mann. His appearance did not quite correspond to my idea 
of a learned professor. He was an immensely burly, good- 
natured fellow, who came in in his shirt-sleeves, and who, 
when he learned what I wanted, burst out into a Her'r'r' 
Gottsdon7ieriuetter ! of surprise, as he well might. But I 
knew that the Germans were a very sans fa^ on lourgeois peo- 
ple, and still treated him with deep respect. He suggested 
that, as there were a great many American students there, I 
had better call on them. He himself would take me to see 

the Herr , with whom, as I subsequently learned, he 

had more than once had discussions relative to questions of 
University-municipal discipline. As for the startling pecul- 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 143 

iarity which attended my introduction to University life, it is 
best summed up in the remark which the Herr 0. (of Balti- 
more) subsequently made. 

" Great God, fellows ! he made his first call on old Capel- 
mann ! f^ 

He took me to the Herr 0. and introduced me. I was 
overwhelmed with my cordial reception. There was at once 
news sent forth that a new man and a brother fellow-coun- 
tryman had come to join the ranks. "And messengers 
through all the land sought Sir Tannhauser out." I was 
pumped dry as to my precedents, and as I came fresh from 
Princeton and had been through Italy, I was approved of. 
The first thing was a discussion as to where I was to live. 
The Frau Directorinn Louis in the University Place had two 
fine rooms which had just been occupied by a prince. So we 
went and secured the rooms, which were indeed very pleas- 
ant, and by no means dear as it seemed to me. I was to 
breakfast in my rooms, dine with the family at one o'clock, 
and sup about town. 

Then there was a grand council as to what I had better 
study, and over my prospects in life ; and it was decided that, 
as the law-students were the most distinguished or swell of 
all, I had better be a lawyer. So it was arranged that I 
should attend Mittermayer's and others' lectures ; to all of 
which I cheerfully assented. The next step was to give a 
grand supper in honour of my arrival. After the dinner and 
the wine, I drank twelve schoppens of beer, and then excused 
myself on the plea of having letters to write. I believe, how- 
ever, that I forgot to write the letters. And here I may say, 
once for all, that having discovered that, if I had no gift for 
mathematics, I had a great natural talent for Eheinwein and 
lager, I did not bury that talent in a napkin, but, like the 
rest of my friends, made the most of it, firstly, during two 
semesters in Heidelberg : 

" Then I bolted off to Munich, 
And within the year, 



144 MEMOIRS. 

Underneath my German tunic 

Stowed whole butts of beer ; 
For I drank like fifty fishes, 

Drank till all was blue, 
For whenever I was vicious 

I was thirsty too." 

The result of wliich " dire deboshing " was that, having 
come to Europe with a soul literally attenuated and starved 
for want of the ordinary gaiety and amusement which all 
youth requires, my life in Princeton having been one con- 
tinued strain of a sobriety which continually sank into sub- 
dued melancholy, and a body just ready to yield to con- 
sumption, I grew vigorous and healthy, or, as the saying is, 
" hearty as a buck." I believe that if my Cousin Sam had 
gone on with me even-pace, that he would have lived till to- 
day. When we came abroad I seemed to be the weakest ; 
he returned, and died in a few months from our hereditary 
disease. How many hecatombs of young men have been 
murdered by " seriousness " and " total abstinence," miscalled 
temperance^ in our American colleges, can never be known ; 
perhaps it is as well that it never will be ; for if it were, there 
would be a rush to the other extreme, which would " upset 
society." And here be it noted that, with all our inordinate 
national or international Anglo-Saxon sense of superiority to 
everybody and everything foreign, we are in the main thing 
— that is, the truly rational enjoyment of life and the art of 
living — utterly inferior to the German and Latin races. We 
are for the most part either too good or too bad — totally ab- 
stemious or raving drunk — always in a hurry after excitement 
or in a worry over our sins, or those of our neighbours. " Eest, 
rest, perturbed Yankee, rest ! " 

My rooms were on the ground-floor, the bedroom looking 
into the University Square and my study into a garden. 
Next door to me dwelt Paulus, the king of the Eationalists. 
He was then, I believe, ninety-four years of age. He re- 
mained daily till about twelve or one in a comatose condition, 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 1^5 

when he awoke and became lively till about three, when he 
sank into sleep again. His days were like those of a far 
Northern winter, lit by the sun at the same hours. 

The next morning a very gentlemanly young man knocked 
at my door, and entered and asked in perfect English for a 
Mr. Bell, who lived in the same house. I informed him that 
Mr. Bell was out, but asked him to enter my room and take 
a chair, which he did, conversing with me for half an hour, 
when he departed, leaving a card on a side-table. In a few 
minutes later, 0., who was of the kind who notice everything, 
entered, took up the card, and read on it the name and ad- 
dress of the young Grand Duke of Baden, who was naturally 
by far the greatest man in the country, he being its heredi- 
tary ruler. 

" Where the devil did you get this ? " asked 0., and all, in 
amazement. 

" Oh," I replied, " it's only the Duke. He has just been 
in here making a call. If you fellows had come five minutes 
sooner you'd have seen him. Have some beer ! " 

The impression that I was a queer lot, due to my making 
my first call on Capelmann et cetera^ was somewhat strength- 
ened by this card, until I explained how I came by it. But 
as Dr. Johnson in other words remarked, there are people to 
whom such queer things happen daily, and others to whom 
they occur once a year. And there was never yet a living 
soul who entered into my daily life who did not observe that 
I belong to the former class. If I have a guardian angel, it 
must be Edgar A. Poe's Angel of the Odd. But he generally 
comes to those who belong to him ! 

It was a long time before I profited much by my lectures, 
because it was fearful work for me to learn German. I en- 
gaged a tutor, and worked hard, and read a great deal, and 
talked it co7i amove; but few persons would believe how 
slowly I learned it, and with what incredible labour. How 
often have I cursed up hill and down dale, the Tower of 
Babel, which first brought the curse of languages upon the 



146 



MEMOIRS. 



world ! And what did I ever have to do with that Tower ? 
Had I lived in those days, I would never have laid hand to 
the work in merry, sunny, lazy Babylon, nor contributed a 
brick to it. By the way, it was a juvenile conjecture of mine 
that the Tower of Babel was destroyed for being a shot-tower, 
in which ammunition was prepared to be used by the heathen. 
Which theory might very well have been inspired by a verse 
from the old Puritanical rendering of the Psalms :— 

" Ye race itt is not alwayes gott 
By him who swiftest runns, 
Nor y« Battell by y« Peo-pel 

Who shoot with longest gunnes." 

Even before I had gone to Princeton I had read and 
learned a great deal relative to Justinus Kerner, the great 
German supernaturalist, mystic, and poet, firstly from a 
series of articles in the Dublin Uiiiversity Magazine, and 
later from a translation of " The Seeress of Prevorst," and 
several of the good man's own romances and lyrics. I sup- 
pose that, of all men on the face of the earth, I should have 
at that time preferred to meet him. Wherefore, as a matter 
of course, it occurred that one fine morning a pleasant gentle- 
manly German friend of mine, who spoke English perfectly, 
and whose name was Klicker, walked into my room, and 
proposed that we should take a two or three days' walk up 
the Neckar with our knapsacks, and visit the famous old 
ruined castle of the Weibertreue. My mother had read me 
the ballad-legend of it in my boyhood, and I had learned it 
by heart. Indeed, I can still recall it after sixty years : — 

" Who can tell me where Weinsberg lies? 

As brave a town as any ; 
It must have sheltered in its time 

Brave wives and maidens many : 
If e'er I wooing have to do, 
Good faith, in Weinsberg I will woo ! " 

" And then, when we are there," said Rlicker, " we will call 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 147 

on an old friend of my father's, named Justinus Kerner. 
Did you ever hear of him ? " 

Did a Jew ever hear of Moses, or an American of General 
Washington ? In five minutes I convinced my friend that I 
knew more about Kerner than he himself did. Whereupon it 
was decided that we should set forth on the following morning. 

Blessed, beautiful, happy summer mornings in Suabia — 
green mounts and grey rocks with old castles — peasants har- 
vesting hay — a Kirchiueih^ or peasant's merry-making, with 
dancing and festivity — till we came to Weinsberg, and forth- 
with called on the ancient sage, whom we found with the 
two or three ladies and gentlemen of his family. I saw at a 
glance that they had the air of aristocracy. He received us 
very kindly, and invited us to come to dinner and sup with 
him. 

The Weibertreue is an old castle which was in or at the 
end of Dr. Kerner's garden. Once, when all the town had 
taken refuge in it from the Emperor Conrad, the latter gave 
the women leave to quit the fort, and also permission to 
every one to carry with her whatever was unto her most valu- 
able, precious, or esteemed. And so the dames went forth, 
every one bearing on her back her husband. 

In the tower of the castle, or in its wall, which was six 
feet thick, were eight or ten windows, gradually opening like 
trumpets, through which the wind blew all the time, and 
pleasantly enough on a hot summer day. In each of these 
the Doctor had placed an ^olian harp, and he who did not 
believe in fairies or the gentle spirit of a viewless sound 
should have sat in that tower and listened to the music as it 
rose and fell, as in endless solemn glees or part-singing ; one 
harp stepping in, and pealing out richly and strangely as 
another died away, while anon, even as the new voice came, 
there thrilled in unison one or two more Ariels who seemed 
to be hurrying up to join the song. It was a marvellous 
strange thing of beauty, which resounded, indeed, all over 
Germany, for men spoke of it far and wide. 



148 MEMOIRS. 

Quite as marvellous, in the evening, was the Doctor's own 
performance on the single and double Jew's harp. From 
this most unpromising instrument he drew airs of such ex- 
quisite beauty that one could not have been more astonished 
had he heard the sweet tones of Grisi drawn from a cat by 
twisting its tail. But we were in a land of marvels and won- 
ders, or, as an English writer described it, " Weinsberg, a 
place on the Neckar, inhabited partly by men and women — 
some in and some out of the body — and partly by ghosts." 
There were visions in the air, and dreams sitting on the stair- 
cases ; in fact, when I saw the peasants working in the fields, 
I should not have been astonished to see them vanish into 
mist or sink into the ground. 

And yet from the ruined castle of the Weibertreue 
Kerner pointed out to us a man walking along the road, and 
that man was the very incarnation of all that was sober, 
rational, and undream-like ; for it was David Strauss, author 
of the " Life of Jesus." And at him too I gazed with the 
awe due to a great man whose name is known to all the cul- 
tured world ; and to me much more than the name ; for I 
had read, as before mentioned, his " Life of Jesus " when I 
first went to Princeton. 

Dr. Kerner took to me greatly, and said that I very much 
reminded him, in appearance and conversation, of what his 
most intimate friend, Ludwig Uhland, had been at my age ; 
and as he repeated this several times, and spoke of it long 
after to friends, I think it must have been true, although I 
am compelled to admit that people who pride themselves on 
looking like this or that celebrity never resemble him in the 
least, mentally or spiritually, and are generally only mere 
caricatures at best. 

On our return we climbed into an old Gothic church- 
tower, in which I found a fifteenth-century bell, bearing the 
words. Vivas voco, mortuos plango^fulgura frango^ and much 

more — 

" The dead I knell, the living wake, 

And the power of lightning break ! " 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 14,9 

which caused me to reflect on the vast degree to which all 
the minor uses and observances of the Church — which are 
nine-tenths of all their religion to the multitude — were only 
old heathen superstitions in new dresses. The bell was a 
spell against the demons of lightning in old Etrurian days ; 
to this time the Tuscan peasant bears one in the darkening 
twilight-tide to drive away the witches flitting round : in him 
and them " those evening bells " inspired a deeper sentiment 
than poetry. 

In a village, Riicker, finding the beer very good, bought 
a cask of it, which was put on board the little Neckar steam- 
boat on which we returned to Heidelberg. And thus pro- 
vided, the next evening he gave a " barty " up in the old 
castle, among the ruins by moonlight, where I " assisted," 
and the lager was devoured, even to the last drop. 

I soon grew tired of the family dinners with the Frau 
Inspectorinn and the Herr Inspector with the one tumbler 
of Neckar wine, which I was expected not to exceed ; so I 
removed my dining to the " Court of Holland," a first-class 
hotel, where 0. and the other Americans met, and where the 
expectation was not that a man should by any means limit 
himself to one glass, but that, taking at least one to begin 
with, he should considerably exceed it. This hotel was kept 
by a man named Spitz, who looked his name to perfection. 

" Er spitzt betriibt die Nase," 

as Scheflel wrote of him in his poem, Niimero Aclit^ the scene 
of which is laid in the " Court of Holland." Here a word 
about Scheflel. During the following semester he was for 
months a daily table-companion of mine at the Bremer-Eck, 
where a small circle of students — quorum pars fid — met 
every evening to sup and kneip^ or to drink beer and smoke 
and sing until eleven. Little did I dream in those days that 
he would become the great popular poet of his time, or that 
I should ever translate his Gaucleamiis. I owe the " Court 
of Holland " to this day for a dinner and a bottle of wine. 



150 MEMOIRS. 

It is the only debt I owe, to my knowledge, to anybody on 
earth. 

It was resolved among the Americans that we should all 
make a foot-excursion with knapsacks down the Ehine to 
Cologne. It was done. So we went gaily from town to town, 
visiting everything, making excursions inland now and then. 
We had a bottle or two of the best Johannisberg in the very 
Schloss itself — omne cum prcBtio — and meeting with such 
adventures as befell all wandering students in those old- 
fashioned, merry times. The Ehine was wild as yet, and not 
paved, swept, garnished and full of modern villas and adorn- 
ment, as now. I had made, while in America, a manuscript 
book of the places and legends of and on the Ehine, with 
many drawings. This, and a small volume of Snow's and 
Planche's " Legends of the Ehine," I carried with me. I was 
already well informed as to every village and old ruin or 
tower on the banks. 

So we arrived at Cologne, and saw all the sights. The 
cathedral was not then finished, and the town still boasted its 
two-and-seventy stinks, as counted by Coleridge. Then we 
returned by steamer to Mainz, and thence footed it home. 

Little by little I rather fell away from my American 
friends, and began to take to German or English associates, 
and especially to the company of two Englishmen. One was 
named Leonard Field, who is now a lawyer in Lincoln's Inn 
Fields ; the other was Ewan P. Colquhoun, a younger brother 
of Sir Patrick Colquhoun, whom I knew well, and as friend, 
in after years, until his recent death. I always, however, 
maintained a great intimacy with George Ward, of Boston, 
who became long after a banker and Baring's agent in Amer- 
ica. In one way and another these two twined into my life 
in after years, and led to my making many acquaintances or 
friends. 

I walked a great deal all about Heidelberg to many very 
picturesque places, maintaining deep interest in all I saw 
by much loving reading of Des Knahen Wunderliorn and 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 15X 

Uhland's collection of old German songs — his own poems I 
knew long before — the Nihelungen and Hero-Booh^ and a 
great variety of other works. I had dropped the Occulta, 
and for a year or two read nothing of the kind except casually 
the works of Eckhartshausen and Justinus Kerner. I can 
now see that, as I became healthy and strong, owing to the 
easy, pleasant existence which I led, it was best for me after 
all. " Grappling with life " and earnestly studying a pro- 
fession then might have extinguished me. My mental spring, 
though not broken, was badly bent, and it required a long 
time to straighten it. 

Colquhoun was only eighteen, but far beyond his years in 
dissipation, and well-nigh advanced to cool cynicism. With 
him I made many an excursion all about the country. 
"Wherever a Kirchiveih or peasants' ball was to be held, he 
always knew of it, and there we went. One morning early 
he came to my rooms. There was to be a really stunning 
duel fought early between a Senior and some very illustrious 
Schldge7\ and he had two English friends named Burnett 
who would go with us. So we went, and meeting with Eiicker 
at the Paivhhoden^ it was proposed that we should go on to- 
gether to Baden-Baden. To which I objected that I had 
only twenty florins in my pocket, and had no time to return 
home for more. " Never mind," said Colquhoun ; " Riicker 
has plenty of money ; we can borrow from him." 

"We went to Baden and to the first hotel, and had a fine 
dinner, and saw the Burnetts off. Then, of course, to the 
gaming-table, where Colquhoun speedily lost all his money, 
and I so much that I had but ten florins left. " Never 
mind ; we'll pump on Eiicker," said Colquhoun. 

We went up to visit the old castle. While there, Eiicker 
took off his overcoat, in which he had his pocket-book, and 
laid it over a chair. When we returned to the hotel the 
pocket-book was gone ! There we were, with a hotel- bill to 
pay and never a cent wherewith to pay it. I had, however, 
still ten florins. Colquhoun suddenly remembered that he 



152 MEMOIRS. 

had seen something in the town, price ten florins, which he 
must buy. It was something which he had promised to buy 
for a relative in England. It was a very serious case of 
necessity. 

I doubted my dear friend, but having sv/orn him by all 
his gods that he would not gamble with the money, I gave 
it to him. So he, of course, went straight to the gaming- 
table, and, having luck, won enough to pay our debt and 
take us home. 

I should mention that Elicker went up to the castle 
and found his pocket-book with all the money. " For not 
only doth Fortune favour the bold," as is written in my 
great unpublished romance of " Flaxius the Immortal," " but, 
while her hand is in, also helps their friends with no un- 
sparing measure, as is marvellously confirmed by Machia- 
velli." 

Vacation came. My friends scattered far and wide. I 
joined with three German friends and one Frenchman, and 
we strapped on our knapsacks for a foot-journey into Switzer- 
land. First we went to Freiburg in Baden, and saw the old 
Cathedral, and so on, singing, and stopping to drink, and 
meeting with other students from other universities, and 
resting in forests, amid mountains, by roaring streams, and 
entering cottages and chatting with girls. Hurra ! frei ist 
der hitrsch ! 

One afternoon we walked sixteen miles through a rain 
which was like a waterfall. I was so drenched that it was 
with difficulty I kept my passport and letter of exchange 
from being ruined. When we came out of the storm there 
were six of us ! Another student had, unseen, joined our 
party in the rain, and I had never noticed it ! 

We came to a tavern at the foot of the Eigiberg. My 
pack was soaked. One friend lent me a shirt, another a 
pair of drawers, and we wrapped ourselves in sheets from 
the beds and called for brandy and water hot — a pleasing 
novelty to the Germans — and so went to bed. The next day 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. I53 

we ascended the Rigi ; found many students there ; did not 
see the sun rise in the morning, but still a mighty panorama, 
wondrous fair, and so walked down again. And receiving 
my carpet-bag at Lucerne, whither I had had the precaution to 
send one, I dressed myself again in clean linen and went back 
to Germany. I meant to travel more in Switzerland, but it 
was very rainy that year, and, as it proved, I did wisely. 

I returned to Spitz, but his house was full of English, 
and he informed me, rather exultantly and foolishly, that he 
had no room for me, and could not tell me where to go, 
" every place was full." As I had spent money freely with 
him I did not like it. The head -waiter followed me out and 
recommended the Black Eagle, kept by Herr Lehr. There 
I went, got a good room, and for months after dined daily at 
its table- cVliote. I sent friends there, and returned to the 
house with my wife twenty years later. My brother also 
went there long after, and endeared himself to all, helping 
Herr Lehr to plant his vines. In after years Herr Lehr had 
forgotten me, but not my brother. Lehr's son was a gentle- 
manly young fellow, well educated. He became a captain, 
and was the first officer killed in the Franco-German war. 

Vacation passed, and the students returned and lectures 
were resumed. There was a grand Commers or students' 
supper meeting at which I was present ; and again the duel- 
ling-ground rang with the sound of blades, and all was merry 
as before. Herr Zimmer, the University dancing-master, 
gave lessons and cotillion or waltzing-parties thrice a week, 
and these I regularly attended. Those who came to them 
were the daughters of the humbler professors and respect- 
able shopkeepers. During the previous session I had taken 
lessons from a little old Frenchman, who brought his fiddle 
and a pretty daughter twice a week to my room, where, with 
Ward, we formed a class of three. 

This gentleman was a perfect type — fit to be staged with- 
out a touch of change — of the old emigre^ who has now van- 
ished, even from among the French. His bows, his wit — la 



154 MEMOIRS. 

grace extr^ordinawe — the intonations of his voice, and his 
vivacity, were beyond the art of any actor now living. There 
were many more peculiar and marked types of character in 
the last generation than now exist, when Everybody is becom- 
ing Everybody else with such fearful rapidity. 

There were four great masked balls held in Heidelberg 
during the winter, each corresponding to a special state of 
society. That at the Museum or great University Club was 
patronised by the elite of nobility and the professors and 
their families. Then came the Harmonie — respectable, but 
not aristocratic. Then another in a hotel, which was rather 
more rowdy than reputable ; not really outrageous, yet where 
the gentlemen students " whooped it up " in grand style with 
congenial grisettes ; and, finally, there was a fancy ball at 
the Waldhorn, or some such place, or several of them, over 
the river, where peasants and students with maids to match 
could waltz once round the vast hall for a penny till stopped 
by a cordon of robust rustics. "We thought it great fun with 
our partners to waltz impetuously and bump with such force 
against the barrier as to break through, in which case we 
were not only greatly admired, but got another waltz gratis. 
"We had wild peasant-dancing in abundance, and the con- 
sumption of wine and beer was something awful. 

One morning a German student named Griiner, who had 
been at Jena, came to my room with a brilliant proposition. 
We should go to Frankfort and hear Jenny Lind sing in her 
great role of Norma. I had already heard her sing in con- 
cert in Heidelberg — where, by the way, the students rushed 
into her room as soon as she had left, and tore to strips the 
bed in which she had slept, and carried them away for sou- 
venirs, to the great amazement of an old Englishman who 
had just been put into the room. (N. B. — I was not in the 
party.) I objected that it was getting to the end of the 
month, and that I had not money enough for such an out- 
ing. To which he replied, that we could go on to Homburg, 
and make money enough at rouge-et-noir to cover all ex- 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 155 

penses. This obvious and admirable method of raising funds 
had not occurred to me, so I agreed to go. 

We went to Frankfort, and heard the greatly overrated 
Jenny Lind, and the next day proceeded to Hamburg, and 
at once to the green table. Here I lost a little, but Griiner 
made so much, that on returning to the table I took from it 
a sufficient sum to cover all our expenses, and told him that, 
come what might, it must remain untouched, and gave him 
the remainder. That afternoon I played for five-franc pieces, 
and at one time had both my side-pockets so full that they 
weighed very heavily. And these again I lost. Then Griiner 
lost all his, and came imploring me for more, but I would 
not give him a Icreutzer. Matters were beginning to look 
serious. I had a reserved fund of perhaps fifty napoleons, 
which I kept for dire need or accidents. That evening I 
observed a man who had great luck, winning twice out of 
three times. I watched his play, and as soon as he lost I set 
a napoleon — by which I won enough to clear my expenses, 
and buy me, moreover, a silver-headed cane, a gold watch- 
chain, and two Swiss watches. I may mention by the way, 
that since that day I have never played at anything, save 
losing a ten-franc piece in after years at Wiesbaden. 

There dined very often at our table-cVMte in the Adler 
an old German lady named Helmine von Chezy, who had a 
reputation as a poetess. With her I som^etimes conversed. 
One day she narrated in full what she declared was the true 
story of Caspar Hauser. L^nto her Heine had addressed the 
epigram — 

" Helmine von Chezy, 

Geborene Klencke, 

Ich bitte Sie, geh' Sie 

Mit ihrer Poesie, 

Sonst kriegt Sie die Kranke ! " 

" Helmine von Chezy, 
Born Klencke, I pray 
With your pestilent poems 
You'll hasten awav." 



156 MEMOIRS. 

There was also an elderly and very pleasant Englishman, 
with whom I became rather intimate, and who was very kind 
to me. This was the well-known Captain Medwin, who had 
known so well Byron, Shelley, Trelawny, and their compeers. 
He was full of anecdotes, which I now wish that I had re- 
corded. He introduced me to Lady Caroline de Crespigny, 
who was then living permanently in Heidelberg. This lady, 
who was said to be then fifty years of age, was still so young- 
looking and beautiful, that I cannot remember in all my life 
to have ever seen such an instance of time arrested. I also 
made the acquaintance of Professor Creutzer, author of the 
Symlolik^ a work of vast learning.* And I went to balls, 
one at Professor Gervinus's. 

I entered myself with the great Leopold Gmelin for a 
course of lectures on chemistry, and worked away every 
morning with the test-tubes at analytical chemistry under 
Professor Posselt, at which I one day nearly poisoned myself 
by tasting oxalic acid, which I did not recognise under its 
German name of Kleesdure, I read broad and wide in Ger- 
man literature, as I think may be found by examining my 
notes to my translation of Heine's works, and went with 
Pield several times to Frankfort, to attend the theatre, and 
otherwise amuse ourselves. There I once made the acquaint- 
ance of the very famous comic actor Hasselt. He was a 
grave, almost melancholy man when off the stage, very fond 
of archgeology and antiquities. 

The winter drew to an end. I had long felt a deep de- 
sire to visit Munich, to study art, and to investigate funda- 
mentally the wonderful and mysterious science of Esthetics, 
of which I had heard so much. So I packed up and paid my 
bills, and passing through one town where there was in the 
hotel where I stopped, the last wolf ever killed in Germany, 



* He was the real head, and the most sensible, of that vast array of 
wild antiquaries, among whom are Faber, Godfrey Higgins, Inman, 
Bryant, and several score more whom I in my youth adored and de- 
voured with a delight surpassing words. 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 157. 

and freshly killed (I believe he has been slain two or three 
times since), and at another where I was invited to see a 
criminal beheaded by the sword — which sight I missed by 
over-sleeping myself — I came through Stuttgart, Ulm, and 
Augsburg to the German Athens. 

I went to the Hotel Maulick, where I stayed a week. 
Opposite to me at table every day sat the famous Saphir, the 
great Vienna wit and licensed joker. Of course I soon be- 
came acquainted with some students, and was entered at the 
University, and got the card which exempted me from being 
arrested by any save the University beadles. I believe that 
we even had our own hangman, but as none of my friends 
ever had occasion for his services I did not inquire. The 
same ticket also entitled me to attend the opera at half-price, 
and if it had only included tobacco and beer gratis, it would 
have been the means of vast economies. 

I entered myself for a course of lectures by Professor 
Friedrich Thiersch on Esthetics. He it was who had trained 
Heine to art, and I venture to say that in my case the seed 
fell on good ground. I took in every thought. His system 
agreed, on the whole, perfectly with that advanced in after 
years by Taine, and marvellously well with that set forth in 
the " Essays, Speculative and Suggestive," of J. A. Symonds 
— that is, it was eclectic and deductive from historical peri- 
ods, and not at all " rhapsodical " or merely subjective. I 
bought the best works, such as Kugler's, for guides, and stud- 
ied hard, and frequented the Pinacothek and Glyptothek, and 
I may say really educated myself well in the history of art and 
different schools of aesthetics. My previous reading, travel, 
and tastes fitted me in every way to easily master such knowl- 
edge. I also followed Becker's course on Schelling, but my 
heart was not in it, as it would have been two years before. 
The lectures of Professor Henry and Gmelin and true Sci- 
ence had caused in me a distrust of metaphysics and psy- 
chological systems and theories. I began to see that they 
were all only very ingenious shufflings and combinations and 
s 



158 MEMOIRS. 

phases of the same old cards of Pantheism, which could be 
made into Theism, Pietism, Atheism, or Materialism to suit 
any taste. I was advancing rapidly to jDure science, though 
Evolution was as yet unknown by the name, albeit the Oken- 
ites and others with their Natur-pliilosopliie were coming 
closely to it. 

In fact, I think it may be truly said that, as regarded de- 
ducing man and all things from a prima matei^ia or proto- 
plasm by means of natural selection and vast study of differ- 
entiation, they were exactly where Darwin, and Wallace, and 
Huxley were when we began to know the latter. I do not 
agree with Max Miiller in his very German and very artfully 
disguised and defended theory that the religious idea origi- 
nated in a vague sense of the Infinite in the minds of sav- 
ages ; for I believe it began with the bogeys and nightmares 
of obscure terror, hunger, disease, and death ; but the Pro- 
fessor is quite right in declaring that Evolution was first cre- 
ated or developed in the German Natur-philosoijliie^ the true 
beginning of which was with the Italian naturalists, such as 
Bruno and De Cusa. What is to be observed is this, yet few 
understand it, nor has even Symonds cleared the last barrier 
— that when a Pantheist has got so far as to conceive an iden- 
tity between matter and spirit, while on the other hand a sci- 
entific materialist rises to the unity of spirit and matter, there 
is nothing to choose between them. Only this is true, that 
the English Evolutionists, by abandoning reasoning based on 
Pantheistic poetic bases, as in Schelling's case, or purely 
logical, as in Hegel's, and by proceeding on plainly prosaic, 
merely material, simply scientific grounds after the example of 
Bacon, swept away so much rubbish that people no longer rec- 
ognised the old temple of Truth, and really thought it was a 
brand new workshop or laboratory. But I can remember very 
distinctly that to me Evolution did 7iot come as if I had re- 
ceived a new soul, or even a new body, but had merely had a 
bath, and put on new garments. And as I became an Eng- 
lish Evolutionist in due time, I had this great advantage, that 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 159 

by beginning so young I succeeded in doing very thoroughly 
what Symonds and Maudsley and many more clearly under- 
stand is most difficult — that is, not merely to accept the truth, 
but to get rid of the old associations of the puzzle of a differ- 
ence between spirit and matter, which thing caused even the 
former to muddle about " God," and express disgust at " Ma- 
terialism," and declare that there is " an insoluble problem," 
which is all in flat contradiction to pure Evolution, which 
does not meddle with " the Unknowable." 

There was a Jewish professor named Karl Friedrich Neu- 
mann, who was about as many-sided a man as could be found 
even in a German university. He was a great Chinese scholar 
— had been in China, and also read on mathematics and mod- 
ern history. I attended these lectures (not the mathematics) 
and liked them : so we became acquainted. I found that he 
had written a very interesting little work on the visit recorded 
in the Chinese annals of certain Buddhist monks to Fusang 
— probably Mexico — in the fifth century. I proposed to trans- 
late it, and did so, he making emendations and adding fresh 
matter to the English version. 

Professor Neumann was a vigorous reader, but he soon 
found that I was of the same kind. One day he lent me a 
large work on some Indian subject, and the next I brought 
it back. He said that I could not have read it in the time. 
I beofored him to examine me on it, which he did, and ex- 
pressed his amazement, for he declared that he had never 
met with anything like it in all his life. This from him was 
praise indeed. Long after, in America, George Boker in 
closer fashion tested me on this without my knowing it, and 
published the result in an article. 

I became acquainted with a learned writer on art named 
Foerster, who had married a daughter of Jean Paul Kichter, 
and dined once or twice at his house. I also saw him twenty 
years later in Munich. George Ward came in from Berlin to 
stay some weeks in Munich. I saw Taglioni several times at 
the opera, but did not make her acquaintance till 1870. The 



IQQ MEMOIRS. 

great, tremendous celebrity at that time in Munich was also 
an opera-dancer, though not on the stage. This was Lola 
Montez, the King's last favourite. He had had all his mis- 
tresses painted, one by one, and the gallery was open to the 
public. Lola's was the last, and there was a blank space still 
left /or afezu more. I thought that about twenty-five would 
complete the collection. 

Lola Montez had a small palace, and was raised to be the 
Countess of Landsfeldt, but this was not enough. She wished 
to run the w^hole kingdom and government, and kick out the 
Jesuits, and kick up the devil, generally speaking. But the 
Jesuits and the mob were too much for her. I knew her very 
well in later years in America, when she deeply regretted that 
I had not called on her in Munich. I must have had a great 
moral influence on her, for, so far as I am aware, I am the 
only friend whom she ever had at whom she never threw a 
plate or book, or attacked with a dagger, poker, broom, chair, 
or other deadly weapon. We were both born at the same 
time in the same year, and I find by the rules of sorcery that 
she is the first person who will meet me when I go to heaven. 
I always had a great and strange respect for her singular tal- 
ents ; there were very few indeed, if any there were, who really 
knew the depths of that wild Irish soul. Men generally were 
madly fascinated with her, then as suddenly disenchanted, and 
then detracted from her in every way. 

There were many adventuresses in later years who passed 
themselves about the world for Lola Montez. I have met 
with two friends, whom I am sure were honest gentlemen, 
who told me they had known her intimately. Both de- 
scribed her as a large, powerful, or robust woman. Lola was 
in reality very small, pale, and thin, or frele, with beautiful 
blue eyes and curly black hair. She was a typical beauty, 
with a face full of character, and a person of remarkably 
great and varied reading. One of her most intimate friends 
was wont to tell her that she and I had many very strange 
characteristics in common, which we shared with no one else, 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. l^l 

while we differed utterly in other respects. It was very like 
both of us, for Lola, when defending the existence of the soul 
against an atheist, to tumble over a great trunk of books of 
the most varied kind, till she came to an old vellum-bound 
copy of Apuleius, and proceed to establish her views accord- 
ing to his subtle Neo-Platonism. But she romanced and em- 
broidered so much in conversation that she did not get credit 
for what she really knew. 

I once met with a literary man in New York who told 
me he had long desired to make my acquaintance, because he 
had heard her praise me so immeasurably beyond anybody 
else she had ever known, that he wanted to see what manner 
of man I could be. 1 heard the same from another, in an- 
other place long after. Once she proposed to me to make a 
bolt with her to Europe, which I declined. The secret of 
my influence was that I always treated her with respect, and 
never made love or flirted. 

An intimate of both of us who was present when this 
friendly proposal was made remarked with some astonish- 
ment, " But, Madame, by what means can you two live 9 " 
" Oh," replied Lola innocently and confidingly, " people like 
us " (or " who know as much as we ") " can get a living any- 
where." And she rolled us each a cigarette, with one for 
herself. I could tell a number of amusing tales of this Queen 
of Bohemia, but Space, the Kantean god, forbids me more. 
But I may say that I never had more really congenial and 
wide-embracing conversations with any human being in my 
life than with Her Majesty. There was certainly no topic, 
within my range, at least, on which she could not converse 
with some substance of personal experience and reading. 
She had a mania for meeting and knowing all kinds of pe- 
culiar people. 

I lived in the main street near the Karlsthor, opposite a 
tavern called the Ober-Pollinger, which was a mediaeval 
tavern in those days. My landlady was a nice old soul, and 
she had two daughters, one of whom was a beauty, and as 



162 MEMOIRS. 

gentle and Germanly good as a girl could be. Her face still 
lives in a great picture by a great artist. We lived on the 
third floor; on the ground was a shop, in which cutlery and 
some fireworks were sold. It befell that George Ward and I 
were very early in the morning sitting on a bench before the 
Ober-Pollinger, waiting for a stage-coach, which would take 
us to some place out of town ; when bang ! bang ! crack ! I 
heard a noise in the firework shop, and saw explosions puff- 
ing smoke out of the bursting windows. Great God ! the 
front shop was on fire ; it was full of fireworks, such as rock- 
ets and crackers, and I knew there was a barrel of gunpowder 
in the back-shop ! I had found it out a few days before, 
when I went there to buy some for my pistols. And the 
family were asleep. In an instant I tore across the street, 
rushed screaming upstairs, roused them all out of bed, howl- 
ing, " It burns ! — there's gunpowder ! " Yet, hurried as I 
was, I caught up a small hand-bag, which contained my 
money, as I got the girls and their mother downstairs. I was 
just in time to see a gigantic butcher burst open the two-inch 
door with an axe, and roll out the barrel containing two hun- 
dred pounds of gunpowder, as the flames were licking it. I 
saw them distinctly. 

It was the awful row which I made which had brought 
the people out betimes, including the butcher and his axe. 
But for that, there would have been a fearful blow-up. But 
the butcher showed himself a man of gold on this occasion, 
for he it was who really saved us all. A day or tw^o after, 
when I was jesting about myself as a knightly rescuer of 
forlorn damsels, in reply to some remark on the event, 
George Ward called me to order. There was, as he kindly 
said, too much that he respected in that event to make fun 

of it. 

George Ward is deeply impressed on my memory. He 
was a sedate young fellow, with a gift of dry humour, now 
and then expressed in quaint remarks, a gentleman in every 
instinct, much given to reading and reflecting. When he 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 163 

said anything, he meant it, and this remark of his struck me 
more than the event itself had done. 

And to think that I quite forgot, in narrating my Prince- 
ton experiences, to tell of something very much like this in- 
cident. It was in my last year, and my landlady had just 
moved into a new house, when, owing to some defect in the 
building, it caught fire, but was luckily saved after it had 
received some damage. I av/oke in the night, flames burst- 
ing into my room, and much smoke. It happened that the 
day before a friend in Alabama had sent me eleven hundred 
dollars wherewith to pay for him certain debts. My first 
thought was for this money, so I hurried to get the key of 
the secretary in which it was — keys never can be found in a 
hurry — and when found, I could not find the right one in the 
bunch. And then it stuck in the lock and would not open 
it, till finally I succeeded and got the money out. And then, 
not finding myself quite dead, I in a hurry turned the con- 
tents of three drawers in my bureau and my linen on to the 
bed, threw on it my coats and trousers, tied the four corners 
of a sheet together in one bundle, caught up my boots, 
fencing-foils, &c., to make another, and so rescued all I had. 
I verily believe I did it all in one minute. That day the 
President, old Dr. Oarnahan, when I plead " not prepared " 
for failing at recitation, excused me with a grim smile. I 
had really that time some excuse for it. During the Munich 
incident I thought of the sheets. But I had gunpowder and 
two girls to look after in the latter place, and time and tide 
— or gunpowder and girls — wait for no man. 

And so, with study and art and friends, and much terrible 
drinking of beer and smoking of Varinas-Kanaster, and 
roaming at times in gay greenwoods with pretty maids alway, 
and music and dancing, the Munich semester came to an end. 
I proposed to travel with an English friend named Pottinger 
to Vienna, and thence by some adventurous route or other 
through Germany to Paris ; which was a great deal more 
to undertake in those days than it now is, entailing several 



164 MEMOIRS. 

hundred per cent, more pain and sorrow, fasting, want of 
sleep and washing, than any man would encounter in these 
days in going round the world and achieving la grande route ; 
or the common European tour, to boot. For it befell me ere 
I reached my journey's end to pass eighteen nights in one 
month in Eilwagen or waggons, the latter being sometimes 
without springs. And once or twice or thrice I was so ut- 
terly worn and wearied that I slept all night, though I was 
so tossed about that I awoke in the morning literally bruised 
from head to foot, with my chimney-pot hat under my feet ; 
which was worse than even a forced march on short com- 
mons — as I found in after years — or driving in a Russian 
telega^ or jackassing in Egypt, or any other of the trifles 
over which pampered tourists make such heart-rending howls 
now-a-days. 

So we went to Prague, and thence to Vienna, which, in 
the year 1847, was a very different place indeed to what it is 
at present ; for an unbounded gaiety and an air of reckless 
festivity was apparent then all the time to everybody every- 
where. Under it all lurked and rankled abuses, municipal, 
social, and political, such as would in 1893 be deemed in- 
credible if not unnatural (as may be read in a clever novel 
called ,Die sch'one Wienerinn)^ but on the surface all was 
brilliant foam and sunshine and laughing sirens. What new 
thing Strauss would play in the evening was the great event 
of the day. I saw and heard the great Johann Strauss — this 
was the grandfather — and in after years his son, and the sch'one 
Edie his grandson. Everywhere one heard music, and the 
Prater was a gay and festive paradise indeed. There was no 
business; the town lived on the Austrian, Hungarian, Bohe- 
mian, Russian, and other nobility, who in those days were 
extravagant and ostentatious to a degree now undreamed of, 
and on strangers. As for free and easy licentiousness, Paris 
was a trifle to it, and the police had strict orders to encourage 
everything of the kind ; the result being that the seventh 
commandment in all its phases was treated like pie-crust, as 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 1^5 

a thing made to be broken, tbe oftener the better. Even 
on our first arriving at our hotel, our good-natured landlord, 
moved by the principle that it was not good for a young man 
to be alone, informed us that if we wished to have damsels in 
our rooms no objection would be interposed. " Why not?" 
he said ; " this is not a church " ; the obvious inference being 
that to a Viennese every place not a church must necessarilv 
be a temple to Venus. And every Wiener, when spoken to, 
roared with laughter ; and there were minstrels in the streets, 
and musicians in every dining-place and cafe, and great ring- 
ing of bells in chimes, and 'twas merry in hall when beards 
wagged all, and "the world went very well in those days." 
Vienna is a far finer town now, but it is a Quaker meeting- 
house compared to what it was for gaiety forty years ago. 

This change of life and manners has spread, and will con- 
tinue to spread, all over the world. In feudal times the peo- 
ple were kept quiet by means of holidays, carnivals, proces- 
sions, fairs, fairy-tales, treats, and indulgences ; even the 
common childish instinct for gay dress and picturesqueness 
of appearance was encouraged, and at high tides everybody 
was fed and given to drink : so that if the poor toiled and 
fasted and prayed, it might be for months, they had their joy- 
ous revellings to anticipate, when there were free tables 
even for strangers. In those days — 

" A Christmas banquet oft would cheer 
A poor man's heart for half the year." 

This Middle Age lasted effectively until the epoch of the 
Revolution and railroads, or, to fix a date, till about 1848. 
And then all at once, as at a breath, it all disappeared, and 
now lives, so to speak, only in holes and corners. For as 
soon as railroads came, factories sprang up and Capital began 
to employ Labour, and Labour to plot and combine against 
Capital ; and what with scientific inventions and a sudden 
stimulus to labour, and newspapers, the multitude got beyond 
fancy dresses and the being amused to keep them quiet like 



IQQ MEMOIRS. 

children, and so ihejuventus mtrndi passed away. " It is a per- 
fect shame ! " say the dear young lady tourists, " that the peas- 
antry no longer wear their beautiful dresses ; they ought to 
be obliged to keep them up." " But how would yoii, like, my 
dear, if you were of the lower orders, to wear a dress which 
proclaimed it?" Here the conversation ceaseth, for it be- 
comes too deep for the lady tourist to follow. 

How it was we wandered I do not distinctly remember, 
but having visited Nuremberg, Prague, and Dresden, we 
went to Breslau, where a fancy seized us to go to Cracow. 
True, we had not a special vise from a Kussian minister to 
enter the Muscovite dominions, but the police at Breslau, who 
(as I was afterwards told) loved to make trouble for those on 
the frontier, bade us be of good cheer and cheek it out, 
neither to be afraid of any man, and to go ahead bravely. 
Which we did. 

There was a sweet scene at the frontier station on the 
Polish-Kussian line at about three o'clock in the morning, 
when the grim and insolent officials discovered that our pass- 
ports had only the police vise from Breslau ! I was asked 
why I had not in my native country secured the vise of a 
Kussian minister ; to which I replied that in America the 
very existence of such a country as Eussia was utterly un- 
known, and that I myself was astonished to find that Eus- 
sians knew what passports were. Also that I always sup- 
posed that foreigners conferred a great benefit on a country 
by spending their money in it ; but that if I could not be ad- 
mitted, that was an end of it ; it was a matter of very tri- 
fling consequence, indeed, for we really did not care twopence 
whether we saw Eussia or not ; a country more or less made 
very little difference to such travellers as we were. 

Cheek is a fine thing in its way, and on this occasion 
I developed enough brass to make a pan, and enough 
" sass " to fill it ; but all in vain. When I visited the Mus- 
covite realm in after years I was more kindly received. On 
this occasion we were closely searched and re-searched, al- 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 1^7 

though we were not allowed to go on into Kussia ! Every 
square inch of everything was examined as with a microscope 
— even the small scraps of newspaper in which soap or such 
trifles were wrapped were examined, a note made as to each, 
and all put under paper-weights ; and whatever was sus- 
pected — as, for instance, books or pamphlets — was confiscated, 
although, as I said, we were turned back ! And this robbery 
accomplished, we were informed that the stage-coach, or 
rather rough post- waggon, in which we came, would return at 
five o'clock p. M., and that we could in it go back to Dresden, 
and might pass the time till then on a bench outside the 
building — reflecting on our sins ! I had truly some papers 
about me which I did not care to have examined, but these 
were in my cravat, and even Kussian ingenuity had not at 
that time got beyond picking pockets and feeling the linings 
of coats. It has since been suggested to me by something 
which I read that I was under suspicion. I had in Munich 
aided a Swiss student who was under police surveillance for 
political intriguing to escape, by lending him money to get 
away. It is probable that for this my passport was marked 
in a peculiar manner. My companion, Pottinger, was not 
much searched ; all suspicion seemed to fall on me. 

The stage went on, and Pottinger and I sat on the bench 
in a mild drizzle at half -past three in the morning, with as 
miserable a country round about as mortal man ever beheld. 
By-and-bye one of the subs., a poor Pole, moved by compas- 
sion and the hope of reward, cautiously invited us to come 
into his den. He spoke a very little German and a little 
Latin (Pottinger was an Oxford man, and knew several heavy 
classics, Greek and Latin, perfectly by heart). The Pole had 
a fire, and we began to converse. He had heard of America, 
and that Polish exiles had been well treated there. I assured 
him that Poles were admired and cherished among us like 
pet lambs among children, and the adored of the adored. 
Then I spoke of Eussian oppression, and the Pole, in utmost 
secrecy, produced a sabre which had been borne under Kosci- 



168 MEMOIRS. 

usko, and showed us a silver coin — utterly prohibited — which 
had been struck during the brief period of the Polish revo- 
lution. 

The Pole began to prepare Ids coffee — for one. I saw 
that something must be done to increase the number of cups. 
He took up his book of prayers and asked of what religion 
we were. Of Pottinger I said contemptuously, " He is noth- 
ing but a heretic," but that as for myself, I had for some 
time felt a great inclination towards the Panna — Holy Virgin 
— and that it would afford me great pleasure to conform to 
the Polish Catholic Church, but that unfortunately 1 did not 
understand the language. To which he replied, that if lie 
were to read the morning service in Polish and I would re- 
peat it word by word, that the Panna would count it to my 
credit just as if I had. And as I was praying in good earnest 
for a breakfast, I trust that it was accepted. Down on our 
knees we went and began our orisons. 

" Leland ! you humbug ! " exclaimed Pottinger. 

" Go away, you infernal heretic, and don't disturb Chris- 
tians at their devotions ! " was my devout reply. So, prayers 
concluded, there H)a8 coffee and rolls for three. And so in 
due time the coach returned. I rewarded our host with a 
thaler, and we returned to Breslau, of which place I noted 
that the natives never ate anything but sweet cakes for their 
first morning meal. 

We stopped at Corlitz, where I asked a woman standing 
in the half -doorway of the house of Jacob Bohme if that was 
his house. But she had never heard of such a man ! 

Dresden we thoroughly explored, and were at Leipzig 
during the great annual fair. These fairs, in those days, 
were sights to behold. Now they are succeeded by stupen- 
dous Expositions, which are far finer and inconceivably 
greater, yet which to me lack that kind of gypsy, side-show, 
droll, old-fashioned attraction of the ancient gatherings, 
even as Barnum's Colossal Moral Show of half-a-dozen cir- 
cuses at once and twenty-five elephants does not amuse any- 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 169 

body as the old clown in the ring and one elephant did of 
yore. 

Thence to Berlin, where we were received with joy by the 
American students, who knew all about one another all over 
Germany. I very much enjoyed the great art gallery, and the 
conversation of those who, like myself, followed lectures on 
aesthetics and the history of art. Thence to Magdeburg and 
Hanover, Dusseldorf — to cut it short, Holland and the chief 
cities in Belgium. 

I noted one little change of custom in Berlin. In South 
Germany it was a common custom for students, when calling 
on a friend, to bring and leave generally a small bouquet. 
When I did this in Berlin my friends were astonished at it. 
This was an old Italian custom, as we may read in the beau- 
tiful One Hundred and Fifty Bri7idisi or Toasts of Minto. 

" Porto a voi un fior novello, 
Ed, oh come vago e bello ! " 

In 1847 even a very respectable hotel in Holland was in 
any city quite like one of two centuries before. You entered 
a long antiquely-brown room, traversed full length by a table. 
Before every chair was placed a little metallic dish with hot 
coals, and a churchwarden pipe was brought to every visitor 
at once without awaiting orders. The stolid, literal, me- 
chanical action of all the people's minds was then tuo7iclerful. 
An average German peasant was a genius compared to these 
fresh, rosy-fair, well-clad Hollanders. It was to me a new 
phase of human happiness in imbecility, or rather in undis- 
turbed routine ; for it is written that no bird can fly like a 
bullet and doze or sleep sweetly at the same time. Yet, as 
from the Huns, the most hideous wretches in the world, 
there arose by intermixture the Hungarians, who are per- 
haps the handsomest, so from the Knickerbocker Dutch 
sprang the wide-awake New Yorkers ! The galleries in Hol- 
land and Belgium were to me joys unutterable and as the 
glory of life itself. Munich and Thiersch still inspired me ; 



lYO MEMOIRS. 

I seemed to have found a destiny in aesthetics or art, or what 
had been wanting in Princeton ; that is, how the beautiful 
entered into life and was developed in history and made itself 
felt in all that was worth anything at all. Modern English 
writers on this subject — with exceptions like that of J. A. 
Symonds, whose Essays I cannot commend too highly — are 
in the same relation to its grand truth and higher inspiration 
as Emerson and Carlyle to Pantheism in its mightiest early 
forms. For several years the actual mastery of aesthetics 
gave me great comfort, and advanced me marvellously in 
thought to wider and far higher regions. 

I forget where I parted with Pottinger ; all that I can re- 
member was, that early in November I arrived alone in Paris, 
going to some small hotel or other, and that as all the fa- 
tigues of the past many weeks of weary travel seemed to 
come upon me all at once, I went to bed, and never left the 
house till four o'clock p. m. the next day. On the next I 
found my way into the Latin Quarter, and secured a not very 
superior room in the Place Saint-Michel, near the Ecole de 
Medecine, to which I moved my luggage. 

I was very much astonished, while sitting alone and 
rather blue and overcast in my room, at the sudden entrance 
of a second cousin of mine named Frank Fisher, who was 
studying medicine in Paris. He had by some odd chance 
seen my name registered in the newspapers as having arrived 
at the hotel, and lost no time in looking me up. He lived 
on the other side of the Seine in the Boule Rouge, near the 
Rue Helder, a famous happy hunting-ground for les Mches — 
I mean kids or the very dear. I must go forthwith to his 
quarters and dine, which I did, and so my introduction to 
Paris was fairly begun. 

I attended at the College Louis le Grand, and at the 
Sorbonne, all or any lectures by everybody, including a very 
dull series on German literature by Philarete Chdsles. I 
read books. Inter alia, I went through Dante's " Inferno " 
in Italian aided by Rivarol's translation, of which I possessed 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 171 

the very cojnj stamped with the royal arms, and containing 
the author's autograph, which had been presented to the 
King. I picked it up on the Quai for a franc, for which 
sum I also obtained a first edition of Mehisine, which Mr. 
Andrew Lang has described as such a delightful rarity. And 
I also ran a great deal about town. I saw Kachel, and Fre- 
deric Lemaitre, and Mile. Dejazet, and many more at the 
great theatres, and attended assiduously at Bobinot's, which 
was a very small theatre in the Quartier Latin, frequented 
entirely by students and grisettes. I went to many a ball, 
both great and small, including the masked ones of the 
Grand Opera, and other theatres, at which there was dissipa- 
tion and diablerie enough to satisfy the most ardent imagina- 
tion, ending with the grande ronde infer7iale, I made many 
acquaintances, and if they were not by any means all highly 
respectable, they were at least generally very singular or noto- 
rious. One day I would dine at a place outside the Barrier, 
where we had a plain but fairly good dinner for a franc, vin 
compris, and where the honoured guest at the head of the 
table was the chef des claqueurs or head of the paid applauders 
at all the theatres. Then it would be at a private talle-dliote 
of lorettes^ where there was after dinner a little private card- 
playing. I heard afterwards that two or three unprincipled 
gamblers found their way into this nest of poor little inno- 
cents and swindled them out of all their money. When I 
was well in funds I would dine at Magny's, where, in those 
days, one could get such a dinner for ten francs as fifty 
would not now purchase. When aio sec, I fed at Flictoteau's 
— we called him V empoisowieur — where hundreds of students 
got a meal of three courses with half a bottle of ordinaire, 
and not so bad either, for thirty sous. 

It happened one night at Bobinot's that I sat in the front 
row of the stage-box, and by me a very pretty, modest, and 
respectable young girl, with her elder relations or friends. 
How it happened I do not know, but they all went out, leav- 
ing the young lady by me, and I did not speak to her. 



172 MEMOIRS. 

Which " point " was at once seized by the house. The 
pit, as if moved by one diabolical inspiration, began to roar, 
"/Z Vemhrassera!'' (He will kiss her), to which the gallery 
replied, "i/ ne Vemhrassera pas^ 

So they kept it up and down alternately like see-sawing, 
to an intonation ; and be it remarked, by the way, that in 
French such a monotonous bore is known as a scie or saw, as 
may be read in my romance in the French tongue entitled 
Le Lxdin du Chateau^ which was, I regret to say, refused by 
Hachette the publisher on account of its freedom from strait- 
laced, blue-nosed, Puritanical conventionalism, albeit he 
praised its literary merit and style, as did sundry other 
French scholars, if I may say it — who should not ! 

I saw that something must be done ; so, rising, I waved 
my glove, and there was dead silence. Then I began at the 
top of my voice, in impassioned style in German, an address 
about matters and things in general, intermingled with in- 
sane quotations from Latin, Slavonian, anything. A change 
came o'er the spirit of the dream of my auditors, till at last 
they " took," and gave me three cheers. I had sold the 
house ! 

There was in the Rue de la Harpe a house called the 
H6tel de Luxembourg. It was the fragment of a very old 
palace which had borne that name. It had still a magnifi- 
cent Renaissance staircase, which bore witness to its former 
glory. Washington Irving, in one of his earlier tales, de- 
scribes this very house and the rooms which I occupied in it 
so accurately, that I think he must have dwelt there. He 
tells that a student once, during the Revolution, finding a 
young lady in the street, took her home with him to that 
house. She had a black ribbon round her neck. He 
twitched it away, when — off fell her head. She had been 
guillotined, and revived by sorcery. 

I soon removed to this house, where I had two very good- 
sized rooms. In the same establishment dwelt a small actress 
or two, and divers students, or men who were extremely busy 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 173 

all the winter in plotting a revolution. It was considered as 
a nest of rather doubtful and desperate characters, and an 
American caraMn or student of medicine told me of another 
who had fled from the establishment after a few days' expe- 
rience, " for fear lest he should have his throat cut." But 
this was very silly, for none of us would have cut anybody's 
throat for any consideration. Some time ago I read the 
" Memoirs of Claude," who was the head of police in Paris 
during my time, and I was quite startled to find how many 
of the notorieties chronicled in his experiences had been 
known to me personally. As, for instance, Madame Marie 
Farcey, who he declares had a heart of gold, and with whom 
I had many a curious conversation. She was a handsome, 
very ladylike, suave sort of a person, who was never known 
to have an intrigue with any man, but who was " far and 
away " at the very head of all the immorality in Paris, as is 
well known to everybody who was deeply about town in the 
Forties. Claude himself I never knew, and it was to his 
possible great loss ; for there came a time when I could, had 
I chosen, have given him information which would have 
kept him in office and Louis Philippe on the throne, and 
turned the whole course of the events of 1848, as I will now 
clearly and undeniably prove. 

I did not live in the Hotel de Luxembourg for nothing, 
and I knew what was going on, and what was coming, and 
that there was to be the devil to pay. Claude tells us in his 
" Memoirs " that the revolution of February 24 took him so 
much by surprise that he had only three hours' previous no- 
tice of it, and reallv not time to remove his office furniture. 
Now, one month before it burst out I wrote home to my 
brother that we were to have a revolution on the 24th of 
February, and that it would certainly succeed. Those who 
would learn all the true causes and reasons of this may find 
them in my forthcoming translation of " Heine's Letters 
from Paris," with my notes. The police of Paris were very 
clever, but the whole organisation was in so few hands, and 



17:1: 



MEMOIRS. 



we managed so well, that they never found us out. It was 
beyond all question the neatest, completest, and cheapest 
revolution ever executed. Lamar tine himself was not al- 
lowed to know anything about it till he was wanted for 
President. And all over the Latin Quarter, on our side of 
the river, in cafes and balls and in shops, and talking to 
everybody, went the mysterious dwellers of the Hotel de 
Luxembourg, sounding public opinion and gathering signs 
and omens, and making recruits and laying trains, which, 
when fired, caused explosions all over Europe, and sounds 
which still live in history. And all the work was duly re- 
ported at head-quarters. The great secret of the success of 
the revolution was that it was in the hands of so few per- 
sons, who were all absolutely secret and trustworthy. If 
there had been a few more, the police would have found us 
out to a certainty. One who was suspected was " squared." 

At last the ball opened. There was the great banquet, 
and the muttering storm, and angry mobs, and small emeutes. 
There is a mere alley — I forget its name — on the right bank, 
which runs down to the Seine, in which it is said that every 
Paris revolution has broken out. Standing at its entrance, 
I saw three or four shots fired and dark forms with guns 
moving in the alley, and then came General Changarnier 
with his cavalry and made a charge, before which I fled. I 
had to dodge more than one of these charges during the day. 
Before dark the rioting was general, and barricades were 
going up. The great storm-bell of Notre Dame rung all 



night long. 



The next morning I rose, and telling Leonard Field, who 
lived in the same hotel with me, that I was going to work in 
earnest, loaded a pair of duelling-pistols, tied a sash round 
my waist en revolutionnaire, and with him went forth to busi- 
ness. First I went to the Cafe Kotonde, hard by, and got 
my breakfast. Then I sallied forth, and found in the Rue 
de la Harpe a gang of fifty insurgents, who had arms and a 
crowbar, but who wanted a leader. Seeing that I was one of 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 175 

them, one said to me, " Sir, where shall we make a barri- 
cade ? " I replied that there was one already to the right 
and another farther down, but that a third close at hand was 
open. Without a word they handed me tlie crowbar, and I 
prized up the stones out of the pavement, while they under- 
took the harder work of piling them up. In a few minutes 
we had a solid wall eight feet high. Field had on light kid 
gloves, which formed an amusing contrast to his occupation. 
Then remembering that there was a defenceless spot some- 
where else, I marched my troop thither, and built another 
barricade — all in grim earnest without talking. 

I forgot to say that on the previous day I had witnessed 
a marvellously dramatic scene in the Faubourg Saint- An- 
toine, by the market-house. There was across it an immense 
barricade, made of literally everything — old beds, waggons, 
stones, and rubbish — and it was guarded by a dense crowd of 
insurgents, armed or unarmed, of whom I was one. All 
around were at least three thousand people singing the Mar- 
seillaise and the Chant des Girondins. There was a charge 
of infantry, a discharge of muskets, and fifteen fell dead, 
some almost touching me, while the mob around never ceased 
their singing, and the sounds of that tremendous and ter- 
rible chorus mingled with the dying groans and cries of the 
victims and the great roar of the bell of Notre Dame. It 
was like a scene in the opera. This very barricade has been 
described by Victor Hugo in detail, but not all which took 
place there, the whole scene being, in fact, far more dramatic 
or picturesque than he supposed it to have been. 

It seemed to be predestined that I should see every great 
event in that drama, from the charge of Changarnier down 
to the very end, and I hereby declare that on my honour I set 
forth exactly what I saw with my own e3^es, without a shade 
of colour off the truth. 

There was a gar9on named Edouard, who always waited 
on me in the Cafe Rotonde. While I was working for life 
at my second barricade, he came out holding a napkin, and 



176 MEMOIRS. 

examining my labour critically, waved it, exclaimed approv- 
ingly, " Tres Men, Citoyeji Charles — tres Men ! " It was his 
little joke for some days after to call me Citoyen Charles. 

Keturning down the Eue de la Harpe before our house, 
my landlady exclaimed to me in alarm, " Hide your pistols ! 
there is a rnoucJiarcl (spy of the police) following you." I 
believe that I, my blood being up, said something to the 
effect that if she would point him out I would shoot him 
forthwith, but the mouchard had vanished. We had all got 
into cool earnestness by that time as regards shooting, having 
been in it constantly for three days. 

Over the barricade came sprawling a tall ungainly red- 
haired Yankee, a student of medicine, whom I had met be- 
fore, and who began to question me as to what I was doing. 
To which I replied, " What the devil do you want here, any- 
how?" not being in a mood to be trifled with. To which 
he replied, " ISTawthin', only a kinder lookin' reound. But 

what on airth " " But are you for us, or against ? " I 

cried. " Wall, I ain't on no side." " See here ! " I cried in 
a rage ; " those who are not for us are against us. Any one 
of those fellows you see round here would shoot you at once 
if I told him to, and if you don't clear out in double quick 
time, by God I will ! " And at this he made himself scarce 
forthwith, "nor does he come again into this story." 

Then I went down the street, and as a large supply of 
ammunition came to us from our friends, with the aid of a 
student of the Ecole Polytechnique, I distributed it to the 
mob. I had principally boxes of percussion-caps to give. I 
mention this because that young man has gone into history 
for it, and I have as good a right to a share in this extremely 
small exploit as he. Besides, though not wounded by the 
foe, I got a bad cut on my hand from a sharp paving-stone, 
and its scar lasted for many years. 

I had that day many a chance to knock over a piou-piou 
or shoot a soldier, as Field said, but I must confess that I 
felt an invincible repugnance to do so. The poor devils 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 1Y7 

were, after all, only fighting unwillingly against us, and I 
well knew that unless they came over to our side all would 
be up with us. Therefore it was our policy to spare them as 
much as possible. I owe it to Field to state that through all 
the stirring scenes of the Revolution he displayed great calm- 
ness and courage. 

All at once we heard a terrible outcry down the street. 
There was a tremendous massing of soldiers there, and to de- 
fend that barricade meant death to all defenders. I confess 
that I hesitated one instant^ and than rushed headlong to 
join the fight. Merciful God ! the troops had fraternised 
with us, and they were handing over their muskets to the 
mob, who were firing them in the air. 

The scene was terribly moving. My men, who a minute 
before had expected to be shot, rushed up, embraced and 
kissed the soldiers, wept like children — in short, everybody 
kissed and embraced everybody else, and all my warriors got 
guns, and therewith I dismissed them, for I knew that the 
war was now about at an end. 

There was a German-French student named Lenoir, and 
he, with Field and I, hearing that there was sharp work at 
the Tuileries, started thither in haste. And truly enough, 
when we got there, the very devil was loose, with guns firing 
and the guard-house all in a blaze. The door was burst 
open, and Field and I were among the very first who entered. 
We behaved very well, and did not steal anything. I re- 
member that there was a great pile of plate and jewellery 
soon laid by the door. 

I went into the throne-room. There was a great silver 
inkstand on the table, paper and pens, and we wrote, " Re- 
spect Property ! " " Liberty for Italy and Hungary ! " and 
hung the papers up around the room. I wrote one or two 
myself, and touched the inkstand for luck, in case I should 
ever write about the event. 

It was a great and indeed a very touching and beautiful 
sight, for all present were inspired with a feeling like that 



178 MEMOIRS. 

of men wlio have passed a terrible, racking crisis. Nous 
avons vaincu ! Yes, we had conquered. And the Revolu- 
tion had marched sternly on through years of discontent 
unto the year of aggravation, Forty-Eight, when there was 
thunder all round in Europe — and after all, France at one 
desperate bound had again placed herself in the van ! And 
it was first decided by the taking of the Tuileries ! 

Let me dwell an instant on some minor incidents. Many 
of the insurgents had been all night without food. The 
royal dinner was cooking in the kitchen, and it was droll to 
see the men helping themselves and walking off with the 
chickens and joints on their bayonets. I had never seen a 
royal kitchen before. Soon all along the street loafers were 
seen with Jars of preserved cherries, &c., emptying them into 
their caps. I went into the burning guard-house. A savage 
fellow offered me a great tin pail, containing about two gal- 
lons of wine, which he offered me to drink. I was very 
thirsty, but I had a scruple against plunder. Grasping his 
sword, he cried, '-'- Buvez^ citoijen ; c'est clu vin royaV Not 
wishing to have a duel a Voutrance with a fellow-patriot, and, 
as I said, being thirsty, I took a good long pull. We mutu- 
ally winked and smiled. He took a pull also to my health 
and Liberty. We botli " pulled." 

I forgot to mention how my cohort had partially armed 
themselves that morning. They burst into every house and 
carried off all the arms they could find, and then wrote in 
chalk over the doors — " Armes donnees^'' The Musee Cluny 
was very near my hotel and I saw it plundered. Such a 
sight ! I saw one vagabond on a fine stolen horse, with a 
medic^val helmet on his head, a lance in his hand, and a six- 
feet double-handed sword or flamberg hanging behind his 
back. He appeared to be quite drunk, and reared about in 
eccentric gmniades. This genius of Freedom reappeared at 
the Tuileries. Mortal man was never under such tempta- 
tion to steal as I was — just one fifteenth-century poignard as 
a souvenir — from that Museum — in fact, it was my duty at 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 179 

that instant to do so, whispered the tempter in my ear. But 
I resisted ; and lo ! it came to pass in later years that I be- 
came possessed, for a mere trifle, in Dresden, of the court 
dagger, in exquisite carved ivory, which was originally made 
for Francis II. of France, and which has been declared by 
competent authority to be authentic. Owing to his short 
reign there are very few relics of this monarch. 

Some of the blackguards in the mob drew out the royal 
carriages, set fire to them, and rolled them gaily along the 
quai. 

A noble-looking very old gentleman in military costume 
spoke to me before the Tuileries, and saying that he had seen 
all of the old Kevolution and Napoleon's wars, actually with 
tears in his eyes implored me to use my influence to prevent 
any plundering. '■^ Res2:)ectez la pi'operte.'''' There were very 
few gentlemen indeed among the insurgents. I only observed 
two or three in our quarter, and they were all from our hotel, 
or rather lodgings. But the next day every swell in Paris 
came out as an insurgent. They had all worked at barricades 
— so they said. I certainly had not seen any of them at 
work. 

That afternoon I strolled about with Field. We came to 
a barricade. A very pretty girl guarded it with a sword. She 
sternly demanded the parole or countersign. I caught hold 
of her and kissed her, and showed my pistols. She laughed. 
As I was armed with dirk and pistols, wore a sash, and was 
unmistakably a Latin Quarter ehicUa7it, as shown by long 
hair, rakish cap on one side, red neck-tie, and single eye- 
glass, I was everywhere treated as a man and brother, friend 
and equal, warrior, and— by the girls— almost like a first- 
cousin. Field shared the glory, of course. And we made a 
great deal out of it, and were thought all the more of in con- 
sequence. Vive la jeunesse ! 

Coming to a corner, we heard three or four musket-shots. 
We turned the corner, and saw a man lying dead or dying in 
the last quiver, while at his head there was at once placed a 



180 MEMOIRS. 

stick with a paper on it, on which was written with lead- 
pencil, ^''Mort aux voleurs ! " 

The day before, one insurgent had offered me a beautiful 
old silver-mounted sword for one of my pistols, fire-arms be- 
ing so much in demand, but I declined the offer. 

The day after, I went into a cafe. There were some stu- 
dents there who had laid their arms on a table. There was a 
very notorious little lorette, known as Pochardinette, who was 
sb called because she was always half- tipsy. She was even 
noted in a popular song as — 

" La Pochardinette, 
Qui ne sait refuser 
Ni la ponehe a pleine verre, 
Ni sa bouche a baiser." 

Pochardinette picked up a horse-pistol, when its owner 
cried, " Let that be ! That is not the kind of weapon which 
you are accustomed to manage ! " I stared at him with re- 
spect, for he had actually translated into French an epigram 
by Jacopo Sannazar, word for word ! 

I should here mention that on the 24th there was actu- 
ally a period of two hours during which France had no Gov- 
ernment — that is, none that it knev/ of. Then there appeared 
on the walls all at once small placards giving the list of names 
of the Gouvernement Provisoire. Now, during this period of 
suspense there appeared at the Hotel de Ville a mysterious 
stranger ; a small, bustling, active individual, who came in 
and announced that a new Government had been formed, 
that he himself had been appointed Minister, that France 
expected every man to do his duty, and that no one should 
lose their places who conformed to his orders. " I appoint," 
he said, " So-and-so to take command of Vincennes. Here, 
you — Chose! notify him at once and send orders. I believe 
that Tel-et-tel had better take Marseilles. Do any of you fel- 
lows know of a good governor for Mauritius?" So lie gov- 
erned France for half-an-hour and then disappeared, and 
nobody ever knew to this day who this stupendous joker was. 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 181 

A full account of it all appeared some time after, and the 
cream of the joke was that some of his appointed ones con- 
trived to keep their places. This brief dynasty has not been 
recorded in any work save this ! 

It was a droll fact that I had, the year before, at Heidel- 
berg, drawn a picture of myself as an insurgent at a barri- 
cade, and written under it, " The Boy of the Barricades." I 
had long had a strange presentiment as to this event. I gave 
the picture to Peter A. Porter, then a student, and owner of 
a singular piece of property — that is, Niagara Falls, or at 
least Goat Island and more or less of the American side. 
Some time after the 24th he showed me this picture in Paris. 
He himself, I have heard, died fighting bravely in our Civil 
War. His men were so much attached to him that they 
made, to recover his body, a special sally, in which twelve of 
them were killed. He was hon compagno7i^ very pleasant, and 
gifted with a very original, quaint humour. 

If our ungrateful temporary stepmother, Prance, did not 
know it, at least the waiters in the cafes, shopkeepers, and 
other people in the Latin Quarter were aware that Field and 
I were among the extremely small and select number of gen- 
tlemen who had operated at the barricades for the health of 
Freedom, and for some time we never entered a restaurant 
without hearing admiring exclamations from the respectful 
waiters of "Ce5 sont Us Americains ! ^^ or '•^Les Anglais.'^'' 
And indeed, to a small degree, I even made a legendary local 
impression ; for a friend of mine who went from Philadel- 
phia to Paris two years later, reported that I was still in the 
memory of the Quarter as associated with the Eevolution and 
life in general. One incident was indeed of a character 
which French students would not forget. I had among my 
many friends, reputable and demi-reputable, a rather remark- 
able lorette named Maria, whose face was the very replica of 
that of the Laughing Faun of the Louvre — or, if one can 
conceive it, of a very pretty " white nigger." This young 
lady being either enniiyee or frightened by the roar of mus- 
9 



Ig2 MEMOIRS. 

ketry — probably the former — and knowing that I was a Rev- 
olutionist and at work, conceived the eccentric idea of hiring 
a coach, just when the fighting was at the worst, and driving 
over from the Rue Helder to visit me. Which she actually 
did. AVhen she came to a barricade, she gave five francs to 
the champions of liberty, and told them she was bearing im- 
portant political orders to one of their leaders. Then the 
warriors would unharness the horses, lift the carriage and 
beasts somehow over the barricade, re-harness, hurrah, and 
''Adieu, madame! Vive la liberie!'''' And so, amid bullets 
and cheers, and death-stroke, and powder-smoke — hinc et 
inde mors et Zz^cifz^s— Maria came to my door in a carriage, 
and found me out with a vengeance — for I was revelling at 
the time in the royal halls of the Bourbons, or at least drink- 
ing wine out of a tin pail in the guard-house, whereby I escaped 
the expense of a truffled champagne dinner at Magny's— 
while the young lady was about fifty francs out of pocket by 
her little drive, probably the only one taken that day in 
Paris. But she had a fearfully jolly time of it, and saw the 
way that guns were fired to perfection. This, too, became 
one of the published wonders of the day, and a local legend 
of renown. 

Of course all these proceedings put an end to lectures and 
study for the time. Then Mr. Goodrich, our Consul, as I 
have before said, organised a deputation of Americans in 
Paris to go and congratulate the new Gouvernement Pro- 
visoire on the new Republic, of which I was one, and we 
saw all the great men, and Arago made us a speech. Unfor- 
tunately all the bankers stopped paying money, and I had to 
live principally on credit, or sailed rather close to it, until I 
could write to my father and get a draft on London. 

But when the Revolution of June was coming, I deter- 
mined to leave Paris. I had no sympathy for the Socialists, 
and I knew very well that neither the new Government, nor 
the still newer Louis Napoleon, who was looming up so dan- 
gerously behind it, needed my small aid. There was a regu- 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. IS3 

lation in those days that every foreign resident on leaving 
Paris must give twenty-four hours' notice to the police before 
he could obtain his passport. But when I applied for mine, 
it was handed out at once " over the counter," with a smile 
and a wink, as if unto one who was merrily well known, with 
an intimation that they were rather glad that I was going, 
and would do everything to facilitate my departure. I sus- 
pect that my dossier must have been interesting reading ! 
M. Claude, or his successor, was probably of the same mind 
regarding me as the old black preacher in Philadelphia re- 
garding a certain convert, " De Lawd knows we don' want 
no sitch bredderin in dis congregation ! " 

So I went to Rouen and saw the cathedral and churches — 
it was a very quaint old town then — and thence to Havre, 
where I took passage on a steamboat for London. The cap- 
tain had a very curious old Gnostic-Egyptian ring, with a 
gem on which were four animal heads in one, or a chimaera. 
I explained what it was, and that it meant the year. But 
the captain could not rest till he had got the opinion of a 
fussy old Frenchman, who, as a doctor, was of course sup- 
posed to know more than I. He looked at it, and, with a 
great air, remarked, " C^est grecque ! " Then the captain was 
quite satisfied. It was Greek ! 

I went in London to a very modest hotel, where I was, 
however, very comfortable. In those days a bottle of the 
very vilest claret conceivable, and far worse than " Glad- 
stone," cost four or five shillings ; therefore I took to pale 
ale. Ewan Colquhoun soon found me out, and, under his 
guidance, and that of two or three others whom I had met, 
I soon explored London. Firstly, he took me daily to his 
house in St. James Street, where I can recall his mother, 
Mrs. Colquhoun, and father, and brothers, Patrick and 
James. Patrick was a remarkable young man. He had 
graduated at Cambridge and Heidelberg and filled diplo- 
matic capacities in the East, and was familiar with many 
languages from Arabic to Gaelic, and was the first amateur 



184 MEMOIRS. 

light-weight boxer in England, and first sculler on the 
Thames, and had translated and annotated the principal 
compendium of Eoman law. He took me to see a grand 
rowing match, where we were in the Leander barge. So 
here and there I was introduced to a great many people of 
the best society. Meanwhile, with Ewan, I visited the Cider 
Cellars, Evans', the Judge and Jury Club, Cremorne, and all 
the gay resorts of those days, not to mention the museums, 
Tower, and everything down to Madame Tussaud's. I went 
down in a diving-bell in the Polytechnic, and over Barclay 
and Perkins^ Brewery. 

One night Colquhoun and I went to Drury Lane, and, 
after hearing Grisi, Mario, and Lablache together, saw the 
great jt?fl!S de quatre which became a historical marvel. For 
it was danced by Taglioni, Cerito, Carlotta Grisi, and Lucile 
Grahn. In after years, when I talked with Taglioni about 
it, she assured me that night I had witnessed what the 
world had never seen since, the greatest and most perfect 
execution conceivable. For the four great artists, moved by 
rivalry, were inspired to do their best before such an audience 
as was seldom seen. Colquhoun kept pointing out one ce- 
lebrity after another to me ; I verily believe that I saw most 
of the great men and women of the time. And afterwards I 
saw a great number in Parliament. 

There was a rather distinguished-looking Frenchman 
very much about town in London while I was there. He 
was always alone, and always dressed in a long, light over- 
coat. Wherever I went, to Cremorne or the Park, there he 
was. When Louis Napoleon came up in the world and I 
saw his photograph, I at once recognised my Frenchman. 

There roomed next to me in our hotel a German from 
Vienna named Becker. He was an opera-singer, and the 
newspapers said that he was fully equal to the first baritone 
of the day. I forget who that was : was it Pischek ? I liked 
him very much ; he was always in my room, and always sing- 
ing little bits, but I was not much impressed by them, and 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 185 

once told him tliat I believed tliat I could sing as loudly as he. 
He never said a word, but at once let out his whole voice in 
a tremendous aria. I clapped my hands to my ears ; I verily 
believed that he would shatter the windows ! I have heard 
of a singer who actually broke a goblet by vibration, and I 
now believe that it is possible. I was once shown in the 
Hague Museum a goblet which rang marvellously in accom- 
paniment when one sang to it, and have met with others 
like it. 

I was invited by a young friend named Hunt (a son of 
the great Chartist), who had been a friend of mine in Hei- 
delberg, where he had taken his degree as doctor of Philoso- 
phy, to pass a week in the country at a charming old Eliza- 
bethan place, said to have been the original Bleak House. 
Everything there was perfectly delightful. There were two 
or three charming young ladies. I remember among them 
a Miss Oliphaunt. There was a glorious picnic, to which I 
and all walked eight miles and back. I admired on this oc- 
casion for the first time the pedestrian powers of English 
girls. 

I visited Verulamium and St. Alban's Abbey, not then 
" restored," and other beautiful places. It all seemed like a 
fairy-tale, for the charm of my early reading came over me 
like enchantment. One night Hunt and I went into a little 
wayside inn. There were assembled a number of peasants — 
hedgers and ditchers, or such like. We treated them to ale, 
and they sang many strange old songs. Then I was called 
on, and I sang " Sir Patrick Spens," which was well received. 

I returned to London, and found, to my dismay, that I 
had not enough money to take me home ! I had received a 
bill of exchange on a merchant in London, and, in my inno- 
cence, never dreamed that it constituted no claim on him 
whatever for a further supply. I called at his office, saw his 
son, who naturally informed me that they could advance me 
no more money, but referred me to his father. The old gen- 
tleman seemed to be amused, and questioned me all about . 



136 MEMOmS. 

myself. When he found that his Philadelphia correspondent 
was very well known to my father, and that the son of the 
correspondent was a fellow-student of mine at Heidelberg 
and Paris, he asked me how much I wanted. When I re- 
plied, " Only enough to pay my passage," he replied, " Is 
that all ? " and at once gave me the money. Then he ques- 
tioned me as to my friends in London, and said, " You have 
seen something of the aristocracy, I would like you to see 
some of the business people." So he invited me to a dinner 
at the Reform Club, to meet a few friends. Among these 
was a Mr. Birch, son of the celebrated Alderman Birch. He 
had directed the dinner, being a famous gourmet, and Soyer 
had cooked it. That dinner cost my host far more than he 
had made out of me. We had six kinds of choicest wines, 
which impressed me then, 

Mr. Birch was a man of literary culture, and we went 
deeply into books. The next day he sent me a charming 
work which he had written on the religious belief of Shake- 
speare, in which it was fairly proved that the immortal bard 
had none. And I was so well pleased with England, that 
I liked it better than any country I had ever visited. 

In 1870, when I came to London, and found my charac- 
ter of " Hans Breitmann " on three stages at once, I received, 
of course, a great deal of attention. Somebody said to me, 
" Oh, of course ; you come here well known, and are made a 
great deal of." I replied, " Twenty years ago I came to 
London without a single letter of introduction, and had only 
two or three student friends, and received just as much kind 
hospitality." I think that like generally finds its like, so 
long as it is honest and can pay its bills. 

I left Portsmouth for New York in a sailing-vessel or 
packet. I could have returned by steamer, but preferred the 
latter, as I should now, if there were any packets crossing the 
ocean. In old times travel was a pleasure or an art ; now it 
is the science of getting from place to place in the shortest 
time possible. Hence, with all our patent Pullman cars and 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 187 

their dentist's chairs, Procrustean sofas, and headlong pas- 
sages, we do not enjoy ourselves as we did when the coach 
went on the road so slowly as to allow us to see the country, 
when we halted often and long, many a time in curious old 
villages. But " the idea of dragging along in that way ! " 
Well, and what, tourist, dost thou travel for 9 

There was on the vessel in which I sailed, among the few 
passengers, Mrs. and Mr. John Gilbert, a well-known dra- 
matic couple, who were extremely agreeable and genial, the 
husband abounding in droll reminiscences of the stage ; a 
merry little German musician named Kreutzer, son of the 
great composer ; and a young Englishwoman with a younger 
brother. I rather doubted the " solidity " of this young 
lady. By-and-bye it was developed that the captain was in 
love with her. Out of this, I have heard, came a dreadful 
tragedy ; for the love drove him mad, the insanity develop- 
ing itself on the return voyage. The captain had to be im- 
prisoned in his own state-room, where he committed suicide in 
a terrible manner by tearing his throat open with the point of 
a candlestick or sconce. The second mate, who was as coarse 
a brute as a common sailor could be, took command, and as 
he at once got drunk, and kept so, the passengers rose, con- 
fined him, and gave the command to the third, who was very 

young. 

" Thus woman is the cause of fearful deeds." 

However, I freely admit that this incident resulted from 
a long voyage, for we were thirty-five days in going from 
port to port. In only a week, with three or four days' pre- 
liminary sea-sickness, there is hardly time for " flirtation and 
its consequences." Nor was it so much a stormy trip as one 
with long sunny calms. Then we hauled up Gulf- weed with 
little crabs — saw Portuguese men-of-war or sea-anemones 
sailing along like Cleopatra's barges with purple sails, or 
counted flying-fish. Apropos of this last I have something 
to say. During my last trip I once devoted an afternoon to 
closely observing these bird-like creatures, and very distinctly 



188 MEMOIRS. 

saw two cases in which the fish turned and flew against the 
wind or tacked — a fact which has heen denied. 

One day I saw a few rudder-fish playing about the stern. 
They weigh perhaps some six or seven pounds ; so, standing 
on velvet cushions in the cabin, I fished out of the stern- 
window. Then came a bite, and in a second I had my fish 
flapping about on the carpet under the table, to the great 
amazement of the steward, who had probably never had a 
live fish jump so promptly before into his hands. And we 
had it for dinner. One day a ship made to us a signal of 
distress, and sent a boat, saying that they were completely 
out of fuel ; also that their passengers consisted entirely of 
the celebrated Ravel troupe of acrobats and actors. It would 
have been an experience to have crossed in that packet with 
their chief, Gabriel ! 

Gabriel Ravel — it is one of my brother's published tales 
— was a good boxer as well as a marvellous acrobat, and he 
could look like what he pleased. One morning a muscular and 
vain New York swell saw in a gymnasium one whom he sup- 
posed to be a very verdant New Jersey rustic gaping about. 
The swell exhibited with great pride his skill on the parallel 
bars, horizontal pole, et cetera, and seeing the countryman 
absolutely dumbfounded with astonishment, proposed to the 
latter to put on the gloves. " Jersey " hardly seemed to 
know what gloves were, but with much trouble he was got 
into form and set to milling. But though he was as awk- 
ward as a blind cow, the swell pugilist could not for a very 
long time get in a blow. Jersey dodged every hit " some- 
how " in a manner which seemed to be miraculous. At last 
one told on his chest, and it appeared to be a stunner, for 
it knocked him into the air, where he turned a double som- 
ersault, and then fell on his feet. And it seemed as if, 
during this flight, he had been suddenly inspired with a 
knowledge of the manly art, for on descending, he went at 
the swell and knocked him from time. It was Gabriel Ravel. 

We saw an iceberg far away, and lay off on the Grand 



STUDENT LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 189 

Banks (where our steerage passengers caught cod-fish), and 
beheld a water-spout — I once saw two at a time in the Medi- 
terranean — and whales, which were far commoner then than 
now, it being rumoured that the one, and no more, which is 
regularly seen by passengers now is a tame one belonging to 
the White Star or some other line, which keeps him moored 
in a certain place on exhibition ; also that what Gulf- weed 
there is left is grown near New York and scattered by night 
from certain boats. It may be so — this is an artificial age. 
All that remains is to learn that the flying-fish are No. 3 salt 
mackerel set with springs, and I am not sure that I should 
doubt even that. 



IV. 
THE RETURN TO AMERICA, 

1848-1862. 

Home — Studying law with John Cadwallader — Philadelphia as I found 
it — Richard B. Kimball — " Fusang " — Literal reporting in German 
— First experiences in magazines and newspapers — Father Matthew 
— Dr. Rufus Griswold — Engaged to be married — A journey North 
— Colonel Cotl and pistol-practice with him — Alfred Jaell — Editor of 
Barnum's Illustrated News — Dr. Griswold and his MS. — Bixby's — 
Mr. Barnum — My first books — New York society in the early Fifties 
— Alice and Phoebe Carey — Washington Irving — Bayard Taylor — 
N. P. Willis — J. G. Saxe — H. C. Carey — Emily Schaumberg — I be- 
come assistant-editor of the Bulletin — George H. Boker — Cremation 
— Editorial life — Paternal enterprise — My father renews his for- 
tune — I am married — The Republican Convention — First great dis- 
sension with the South — Translating Heine — The lady in the burn- 
ing hotel — The writing of " Hans Breitmann's Barty " — Change to 
New York — Appletons' Cyclopcedia — G. W. Ripley and Charles A. 
Dana — Foreign editing of New York Times — " Vanity Fair " — The 
Bohemians — Artemus Ward — Lincoln's election— The Civil War — 
My political work in the Knicherhocker — Emancipation — I become 
sole editor of the Continental Magazine — What I did in 1862 and 
1863 in aid of the Union cause. 

So we arrived in New York, and within an hour or two 
after my arrival I was in the train e7i route for Philadelphia. 
On the way, I intrusted a newsboy with an English shilling 
to go and get me change. I still await that change. And 
in Philadelphia the hackman who drove me to my father's 
house, as soon as the trunks were removed, departed sud- 
denly, carrying away with him a small hand-bag containing 
several valuable objects, which I never recovered. I began 
to think that if the object of travel be to learn to keep one's 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. 191 

eyes open and avoid being swindled, that I had better have 
remained at home. 

My father had removed to another house in Walnut 
Street, below Twelfth Street. After this he only" changed 
dwellings once more before his death. This constant change 
from one rented house to another, like the changes from 
school to school, is very unfortunate, as I have before said, 
for any family. It destroys all the feeling and unity of 
character which grow up in a settled home. 

I pass over the joy of again seeing my parents, the dear 
sisters, and brother Henry. I was soon settled down, soon 
visiting friends, going to evening parties, making morning 
or afternoon calls, and after a little while was entered as a 
law-student in the office of John Cadwallader in Fourth 

Street. 

I cannot pass over the fact, for it greatly influenced my 
after life, that though everybody was very kind to me, and I 
was even in a small way a kind of lion, the change from my 
late life was very hard to bear. I have read a wonderful 
story of a boy who while at a severe school had a marvellous 
dream. It seemed to last for years, and while it lasted he 
went to the University, graduated, passed into diplomatic 
life, was a great man and beloved ; when all at once he awoke 
and found himself at school again and birchable. After the 
freedom of student life in Heidelberg and Munich and Paris, 
and having been among the few who had carried out a great 
revolution, and much familiarity with the most cosmopolite 
type of characters in Europe, and existing in literature and 
art, I was settled down to live, move, and have all being 
henceforth and perhaps for ever in Philadelphia ! Of which 
city, at that time, there was not one in the world of which so 
little evil could be said, or so much good, yet of which so 
few ever spoke with enthusiasm. Its inhabitants were all 
well-bathed, well-clad, well-behaved; all with exactly the 
same ideas and the same ideals. A decided degree of refine- 
ment was everywhere perceptible, and they were so fond of 



192 MEMOIRS. 

flowers that I once ascertained by careful inquiry that in 
most respectable families there was annually much more 
money expended for bouquets than for books. When a 
Philadelphian gave a dinner or supper, his great care was to 
see that everything on the table was as good or perfect as 
possible. I had been accustomed to first considering what 
should be placed aro^md it on the chairs as the main item. 
The lines of demarcation in " society " were as strongly 
drawn as in Europe, or more so, with the enormous differ- 
ence, however, that there was not the slightest perceptible 
shade of difference in the intellects, culture, or character of 
the people on either side of the line, any more than there is 
among the school-boys on either side of the mark drawn for 
a game. Very trifling points of difference, not perceptible 
to an outsider, made the whole difference between the ex- 
clusives and the excluded ; just as the witch-mark no larger 
than a needle-point indicates to the judge the difference 
between the saved and the damned. 

I had not been long engaged in studying law when I 
made the acquaintance of Eichard B. Kimball, a lawyer of 
New York, who had written a few novels which were very 
popular, and are still reprinted by Tauchnitz. He knew 
everybody, and took a great interest in me, and opened the 
door for me to the Knickerhoclcer Magazine. To this I had 
contributed articles while at Princeton. I now sent it my 
translation of Professor Neumann's " Chinese in Mexico in 
the Fifth Century." I forget whether this was in 1849 or 
1850. In after years I expanded it to a book, of which a cer- 
tain Professor said, firstly in a paper read before the Ameri- 
can Asiatic Society, and secondly in a pamphlet, that there 
was nothing of any importance in it which had not already 
appeared in Bancroft's work on the Pacific. I wrote to him, 
pointing out the fact that Bancroft's work did not appear till 
many years after my article in the Knickerbocker. To which 
the Sinologist replied very suavely and apologetically indeed 
that he was " very sorry," but had never seen the article in 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. I93 

the Knickerhocker^ &c. But he did not publish the correction, 
as he should have done. For which reason I now vindicate 
myself from the insinuated accusation that I borrowed from 
Bancroft. I had, indeed, almost forgotten this work, " Fu- 
sang," when, in 1890, Prince Eoland Bonaparte, at a dinner 
given by him to the Congres des Traditions Populaires, 
startled me by recurring to it and speaking of it with great 
praise. For it vindicates the claim of the French that Des- 
guignes first discovered the fact that the Chinese were the 
first to discover America. If any one doubts this, let him 
read the truly great work of Vinton on the whole. Prince 
Koland had been in China and earnestly studied the subject. 
Von Eichthal had endorsed my views, and wrote to me on 
Fusang. I have been for many years well acquainted with 
his nephew. Baron von Eichthal, and his remarkably accom- 
plished wife, who is expert in all the minor arts. 

My father's resources became about this time limited, and 
I, in fact, realised that he had taxed himself more than I had 
supposed to maintain me abroad. His Congress Hall prop- 
erty did not pay much rent. For my position in the world, 
friends, studies, and society, I found myself very much and 
very often in great need of money. As at that time we were 
supposed to be much richer than we really were, this was an 
additional source of trial. I began to see clearly that in the 
law, as in all business or professions, I should have to wait 
for years ere I could make a living. For the instances are 
very few and far between in which a young man, who has not 
inherited or grown up to a practice, can make one himself at 
once. 

More than this, I was not fitted for law at all. From my 
birth I had absolutely one of those peculiar temperaments 
which really disqualify men for "business." If I had en- 
tered a law-office in which there was much office-work or 
practice, I might have acquired a practical interest in the 
profession, but of this there was in ours literally none what- 
ever. I had a great fondness for copying deeds, &c., but Mr. 



j^94: MEMOIRS. 

Cadwallader, though he very much admired my quaint round 
hand, being the very soul of honour, observing that I was 
eager for such work, would not give me much of it though 
it would have been to his profit, because, as he said, " stu- 
dents who paid should not be employed as clerks only, much 
less as copying machines." As it had always been deeply im- 
pressed on my mind by every American friend that I had 
" no business capacity," and, moreover, as I greatly dreaded 
speaking in court, I had from the beginning a great fear that 
I could never live by the law. I mention this because there 
are many thousands of young men who suffer terribly from 
such apprehension, and often ruin life by it. A few months' 
practice in a mercantile college will go far to relieve the first 
apprehension, while as regards stage fright^ it can be easily 
educated out of anybody, as I have since those days educated 
it out of myself, so that rising to debate or speak inspires in 
me a gaudium certaminis^ which increases with the certainty 
of being attacked. Let the aspirant begin by reading papers 
before, let us say, a family or school, and continue to do so 
frequently and at as short intervals as possible before such 
societies or lyceums as will listen to him. Then let him 
speak from memory or improvise and debate. This should 
form a part of all education whatever, and it should be thor- 
ough. It is specially needed for lawyers and divines, yet a 
great proportion of both are most insufficiently trained in it ; 
and while I was studying law it was never mentioned to me. 
I was never so much as once taken into court or practically 
employed in any manner whatever. 

I remember an amusing incident in the office. Mr. Cad- 
wallader asked me one day to call, returning from my lunch, 
on a certain Mr. Dimpfel, one of his clients, leave a certain 
message and his request as follows : — " I want you, Mr. Leland, 
to be very careful. I have observed that you are sometimes 
inaccurate in such matters, therefore be sure that you give 
me Mr. Dimpfel's very words." Mr. Cadwallader knew 
French and Spanish perfectly, but not German, and was 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. I95 

not aware that I always conversed with Mr. Dimpfel in the 
latter language. When I returned my teacher said — 

" Now, Mr. Leland, can you repeat accurately word for 
luord what Mr. Dimpfel said ? " I replied : 

" Yes. Der Herr Dimjjfel Idsst sich grilssen und meldet 
das er Montag Icommen tvird um halb drei. Und er sagt 
tueiter ..." 

" That will do," cried Mr. Cadwallader ; " you must give 
it in English." 

" I beg your pardon," was my grave reply, " but you 
asked for his very words." 

I began to write for publication in 1849. Mr. John Sar- 
tain, a great engraver, established a magazine, to which I 
contributed several articles on art subjects, subsequently 
many more on all subjects, and finally every month a certain 
number of pages of humorous matter. A man named Manuel 
Cooke established in Philadelphia a Drawirig-Room Journal. 
For this I wrote a great deal for a year or two. It paid me 
no money, but gave me free admission to theatres, operas, 
etc., and I learned a great deal as to the practical manage- 
ment of a newspaper. 

The first summer after my return we went to Stonington, 
and thence to visit our friends in New England, as of yore. 
At Dedham I had an attack of cholera ; my uncle. Dr. Stim- 
son, gave me during the night two doses of laudanum of fifty 
drops each, which cured me. Father Matthew came to Ded- 
ham. I went with a very pretty young cousin of mine named 
Marie Lizzie Fisher, since deceased, to hear him preach. 
After the address, meeting the Father, I went boldly up and 
introduced myself to him, and then Miss Fisher. I think 
that his address must have deeply affected me, since I was 
obliged to stop on my way home to take a drink to steady 
my nerves. It was against the law at that time to sell such 
" poison," so the hotel-keeper took me and my paternal uncle, 
George, who treated, down into the cellar, where he had con- 
cealed some Hollands. I can remember that that pleasant 



196 MEMOIKS. 

summer in Dedham I, one Sunday morning in the church dur- 
ing service, composed a poem, which in after years even found 
its way into " The Poets and Poetry of America." It began 

with the words — 

" O'er an old ruined doorway 
Philosophus hung, 
And madly his bell-cap 
And bauble he swung." 

It was a wild mixture of cosmopolitanism and Ilamletism, 
and it indicates accurately the true state of my cor cordium 
at that time. Earnest thought, or a yearning for truth, and 
worldly folly, were playing a game of battledore and shuttle- 
cock, and I was the feathered cork. There is a song with- 
out words by Mendelssohn, which sets forth as clearly as 
Shakespeare or Heine could have done in words, deep melan- 
choly or unavoidable suffering expressing itself merrily and 
gaily in a manner which is both touching and beautiful, or 
sweet and sad. Without any self-consciousness or display of 
sentimentalism, I find deep traces of this in many little poems 
or sketches which I wrote at that time, and which have now 
been forgotten. I had been in Arcadia ; I was now in a very 
pleasant sunny Philistia; but I could not forget the past. 
And I never forgot it. Once in Paris, in the opera, I used in 
jest emphatically the Kussian word harrasclio^ " good," when 
a Eussian stranger in the next box smiled joyously, and rising, 
waved his glove to me. Once in a brilliant soiree in Phila- 
delphia there was a Hungarian Count, an exile, and talking 
with him in English, I let fall for a joke " Bassama terem- 
tetef'' He grasped my hand, and, forgetting all around, 
entered into a long conversation. It was like the American 
who, on finding an American cent in the streets in Paris, 
burst into tears. So from time to time something recalled 
Europe to me. 

I went now and then to New York, which I liked better 
than Philadelphia. I was often a guest of Mr. Kimball. He 
introduced me to Dr. Kufus Griswold, a strange character 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. I97 

and a noted man of letters. He was to his death so uniformly 
a friend to me, and so untiring in his efforts to aid me, that 
I cannot find words to express his kindness nor the gratitude 
which I feel. He became the editor of a literary magazine 
which was really far in advance of the time. It did not last 
long ; while it endured I supplied for it monthly reviews of 
foreign literature. 

There were not many linguists on the American press in 
those days, and my reviews of works in half-a-dozen languages 
induced some one to pay a high compliment to the editor. 
It was Bayard Taylor, I believe, who, hearing this, declared 
honestly, and as a friend, that I alone deserved the credit. 
This was repeated by some one to Dr. Griswold in such a 
form that he thought / had been talking against him, though 
I had never spoken to a soul about it. The result was that 
the Doctor promptly dismissed me, and I felt hurt. Mr. 
Kimball met me and laughed, saying, " The next time you 
meet the Doctor just go resolutely at him and replace your- 
self. Don't allow him a word." So, meeting Dr. Griswold 
a few days after in Philadelphia, I went boldly up and said, 
" You must come at once with me and take a drink — imme- 
diately ! " The Doctor went like a lamb — not to the slaughter, 
but to its milk — and when he had drunk a comforting grog, 
I attacked him boldly, and declared that I had never spoken 
a word to a living soul as to the authorship of the reviews 
— which was perfectly true, for I never broke the golden 
rule of " contributorial anonymity." So the Doctor put 
me on the staff again. But to the end of his life I was 
always with him a privileged character, and could take, if 
I chose, the most extraordinary liberties, though he was 
one of the most irritable and vindictive men I ever met, 
if he fancied that he was in any way too familiarly 
treated. 

Kossuth came to America, and I was almost squeezed to 
death — right against a pretty German girl — in the crowd at 
his reception in Philadelphia. At the dinner in New York 



198 MEMOIRS. 

I met at Kimball's house Franz Pulszky, and sat by his wife. 
I have since seen him many times in Buda-Pest. 

There lived in Philadelphia a gentleman named Rodney 
Fisher. He had been for many years a partner in an Eng- 
lish house in Canton, and also lived in England. He had 
long been an intimate friend of Eussel Sturgis, subsequently 
of " Baring Brothers." He was a grand-nephew of Caesar 
Rodney, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independ- 
ence, and a son of Judge Fisher, of Delaware. He was a 
man of refined and agreeable manners and an admirable re- 
later of his innumerable experiences in Europe and the East. 
His wife had been celebrated for her beauty. "When I first 
met her in her own house she seemed to me to be hardly 
thirty years of age, and I believed at first she was one of her 
own daughters. She was without exception the most ami- 
able, I may say lovable person whom I ever met, and I never 
had a nuance or shade of difference of opinion with her, or 
know an instant during which I was not devoted to her. I 
visited his house and fell in love with his daughter Belle, to 
whom I became, after about a year, engaged. We were not, 
however, married till five years after. Thackeray, whom I 
knew well, said to a Mr. Curtis Raymond, of Boston, not 
long before leaving for England, that she was the most beau- 
tiful woman whom he had seen in America. I cannot help 
recording this. 

I need not say that, notwithstanding my terrible anxiety 
as to my future, from this time I led a very happy life. 
There was in Philadelphia a very wealthy lady called its 
Queen. This was Mrs. James Rush. She had built the 
finest house in our city, and placed in it sixty thousand 
dollars' worth of furniture. " E un lei palazzo ! " said an 
Italian tenor one evening to me at a reception there. This 
lady, who had read much, had lived long in Europe and 
" knew cities and men." To say that she was kind to me 
would feebly express her kindness. It is true that we were 
by much mutual knowledge rendered congenial. She in- 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. I99 

vited me to attend her weekly receptions, &c., with Miss 
Fisher. There we met and were introduced to all the cele- 
brated people who passed through Philadelphia. One even- 
ing I had there, for instance, a conversation in German with 
Mme. Sontag, the great singer, as with Jerome Bonaparte, 
the nephew. 

When the summer came I joined Mr. Fisher and his two 
daughters — the second was named Mary — in a tour. We 
went to New York, thence up the Hudson, and eastward to 
Boston. After a day's travel we came to a town on the 
frontier line, where we had to stop for two hours. Mr. 
Fisher and I, being very thirsty and fatigued, went ii\to a 
saloon in which were two bars or counters. Advancing to 
the second of these, I asked for brandy. " We don't sell no 
brandy here," replied the man. " This is in Massachusetts : 
go to the other bar — that is in New York." In an instant 
we left New England for the Middle States, and refreshed 
ourselves. Thence we went to Springfield and saw the 
armoury, where guns are made. Thence to Boston, where 
we stopped at a hotel. I went with Miss Belle Fisher for a 
day's excursion to Dedham, where my mother and sisters 
were on a visit. It was very pleasant. 

From Boston we went to Newport, and stayed at the 
Ocean House. There I found Milton Sanf ord, a connection 
of mine and a noted character. He had lived in Florence 
and known Browning and his wife. He was, I believe, 
uncle of Miss Kate Field. He introduced me to Colonel 
Colt, the celebrated inventor or re-discoverer of the re- 
volver; to Alf. Jaell, a very great pianist; and Edward 
Marshall, a brother of Humphrey Marshall. Sanford, Colt, 
Marshall, and I patronised the pistol - gallery every day, 
nor did we abstain from mint - juleps. I found that, in 
shooting. Colonel Colt could beat me at the word, but 
that I always had the best of it at a deliberate " take-your- 
time" shot. There, too, were the two brothers Burnett, 
whom I had met long before in Heidelberg. What with 



200 



MEMOIRS. 



drives aud balls and other gaiety, the time passed pleas- 
antly enough. 

As I spoke German, I became intimate with Jaell. He 
could not sing at all. Once I suggested to him that he 
should compose variations on an air, a German popular song. 
For a day or two he hummed it as well as he could. On the 
third morning he took me into a room where there was a piano, 
and asked me to sing while he played accompaniments. All 
at once he said, " Stop ! I have got it ! " and then he played 
the air with marvellously beautiful variations. He was a 
great genius, but I never heard him play in public as he 
played then. He was in a " high hour." It was wonderful. 
I may here say that in after years, while living at a hotel, I 
became well acquainted with Thalberg, and especially with 
Ole Bull, the violinist, who told me much about Heine. 

So time rolled on for three years. I passed my examina- 
tion and took an office in Third Street, with a sign proclaim- 
ing that I was attorney-at-law and Avohat. During six 
months I had two clients and made exactly three pounds. 
Then, the house being wanted, I left and gave up law. This 
was a very disheartening time for me. I had a great many 
friends who could easily have put collecting and other busi- 
ness in my hands, but none of them did it. I felt this very 
keenly. Quite apart from a young man's pushing himself, 
despite every obstacle, there is the great truth that some- 
times the obstacles or bad luck become insuperable. Mine 
did at this time. 

The author of " Gossip of the Century " has well re- 
marked that " it has been said that however quickly a clever 
lad may have run up the ladder, whether of fame or fortune, 
it will always be found that he was lucky enough to find 
some one who put his foot on the first rung." Which is 
perfectly true, as I soon found, if not in law, at least in 
literature. 

I went more than once to New York, hoping to obtain 
literary employment. One day Dr. Rufus Griswold came to 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. 201 

me in great excitement. Mr. Barnum — the great showman 
— and the Brothers Beech were about to establish a great 
illustrated weekly newspaper, and he was to be the editor and 
I the assistant. It is quite true that he had actually taken 
the post, for which he did not care twopence, only to provide 
a place for me, and he had tramped all over New York for 
hours in a fearful storm to find me and to announce the good 
news. 

Then work began for me in tremendous earnest. Let the 
reader imagine such a paper as the London Illusti'ated News 
with one editor and one assistant ! Three men could not 
have read our exchanges, and I was expected to do that 
and all the minor casual writing for cuts, or cutting down 
and occasional outside work. And yet even Mr. Barnum, 
who should have had more sense, one day, on coming in, ex- 
pressed his amazement on seeing about a cartload of country 
exchanges which I had not opened. But there was some- 
thing in Philadelphia which made all work seem play to me, 
and I long laboured from ten in the morning till midnight. 
My assiduity attracted attention. 

Dr. Griswold was always a little " queer," and I used to 
scold and reprove him for it. He had got himself into great 
trouble by his remarks on Edgar A. Poe. Mr. Kimball and 
others, who knew the Doctor, believed, as I do, that there was 
no deliberate evil or envy in those remarks. Poe's best 
friends told severe stories of him in those days — me ipso teste 
— and Griswold, naught extenuating and setting down 
naught in malice, wrote incautiously more than he should. 
These are the words of another than I. But when Griswold 
was attacked, then he became savage. One day I found in 
his desk, which he had committed to me, a great number of 
further material collected to Poe's discredit. I burnt it all 
up at once, and told the Doctor what I had done, and scolded 
him well into the bargain. He took it all very amiably. 
There was also much more matter to other men's discredit — 
ascensionem expectants — awaiting publication, all of which I 



202 MEMOIRS. 

burned. It was the result of long research, and evidently 
formed the material for a book. Had it ever been published, 
it would have made Home howl ! But, as I said, I was angry, 
and I knew it would injure Dr. Griswold more than anybody. 
It is a pity that I had not always had the Doctor in hand — 
though I must here again repeat that, as regards Poe, he is, 
in my opinion, not so much to blame as a score of writers 
have made out. The tales, which were certainly most authen- 
tic, or at least apparently so, during the life of the latter, 
among his best friends regarding him, were, to say the least, 
discreditable, albeit that is no excuse whatever for publish- 
ing them. I have always much disliked the popular princi- 
ple of judging men's works entirely by their lives, and decid- 
ing against the literary merit of Sartor Eesartus because 
Carlyle put his wife's money to his own account in banco. 

And it is, moreover, cruel that a man, because he has 
been a poet or genius or artist, must needs have every weak- 
ness (real or conjectured) in his life served up and grinned at 
and chatted over, as if he forsooth were a clergyman or some 
kind of make-believe saint. However, the more vulgar a 
nature is the more it will gloat on gossip ; and herein the 
most pretentious of the higher classes show themselves no 
better than the basest. 

I lived at Dan Bixby's, at the corner of Park Place and 
Broadway, where I came very near being shot one night by a 
man who mistook me, or rather my room, for that of the one 
below, in which his wife was, or had been, with another per- 
son. Being very tipsy, the injured individual went one 
storey too high, and tried to burst in to shoot me with a re- 
volver, but I repelled him after a severe struggle, in which 
I had sharp work to avoid being shot. I would much rather 
fight a decent duel any time than have such a " hog-fight." 
I only had a loaded cane. The worst of it was that the in- 
jured husband, having traced his wife, as he erroneously 
thought, to my room, went to Bixby and the clerk, and asked 
who lived in it. But as they were my friends, they dismissed 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. 203 

him gruffly, yet believed all the same that / had " a petticoat 
in my wardrobe." Hence for a week all my friends kept 
making cruel allusions in my presence to gay deceivers and 
Don Juan et cetera^ until in a rage I asked what the devil it 
all meant, when there was an explanation by a clergyman, 
and I swore myself clear. But I thought it was hard lines 
to have to stand the revolver, endure all the scandal for a week, 
and be innocejit all the time withal ! That was indeed bitter 
in the cup ! 

Apropos of this small affair, I can recall a droll scene, de 
eodem genere^ which I witnessed within a week of the other. 
There was a rather first-class saloon, bar, and restaurant on 
Broadway, kept by a good-looking pugilistic-associated in- 
dividual named George Shurragar. As he had black eyes, 
and was a shoulder-hitter, and as the name in Romany means 
" a captain," I daresay he was partly gypsy. And, when 
weary with editorial work, I sometimes dropped in there for 
refreshment. One night an elderly, vulgar individual, 
greatly exalted by many brandies, became disorderly, and 
drawing a knife, made a grand Malay charge on all present, 
a la mole. George Shurragar promptly settled him with a 
blow, disarmed him, and " fired him out " into outer dark- 
ness. Then George exhibited the knife. It was such a dirty, 
disreputable-looking "pig-sticker," that we were all dis- 
gusted, and George cast it with contempt into the street. 
Does the reader remember the scene in " The Bohemian 
Girl " in which the dandy Count examines the nasty knife 
left behind by the gypsy Devilshoof? It was the very 
counterpart of this, the difference being that in this case it 
was the gypsy who despised the instrument. 

Such trivial amusing incidents and rencontres as these 
were matters of almost daily occurrence to me in those days, 
and I fear that I incur the reproach of padding by narrating 
these. Yet, as I write this, I have just read in the " Life of 
Benvenuto Cellini " that he too omits the description of a lot 
of exactly such adventures, as being, like the darkey's im- 



204: MEMOIRS. 

prisonments for stealing, " not worf mentionin' " — and con- 
fess I felt great regret that he did so ; for there is always a 
great deal of local and temporal colour in anything whose 
■^lO^QV finale should be in a police-court. 

Hawthorne used to stay at Bixby's. He was a moody 
man, who sat by the stove and spoke to no one. Bixby had 
been a publisher, and was proud that he had first issued 
Hayward's " Faust " in America. He was also proud that 
his hotel was much frequented by literary men and naval 
officers. He was very kind to me. Once when I complained 
to the clerk that the price of my rooms was too high, he re- 
plied, " Mr. Leland, the prices of all the rooms in the house, 
excepting yours, were raised long ago, and Mr. Bixby charged 
me strictly not to let you knoiu it.^^ Uncle Daniel was a 
gentleman, and belonged to my club — the Century. When 
he grew older he lived on an annuity, and was a great and 
privileged favourite among actresses and singers. Thirty 
years later I called with him in New York on Ada Caven- 
dish. 

After a fortnight or so. Dr. Griswold began to be very 
erratic. He had a divorce case going on in Philadelphia. 
He went off, assuring me that everything was in order, and 
never returned. The foreman came to me saying that there 
was no copy, and nothing ready, and everything needed. 
Here was indeed a pretty kettle of fish ! For I at that time 
absolutely distrusted my own ability to do all the work. I 
flew to Kimball, who said, " Just put it through by strong 
will, and you'll succeed." 

Then I went to Mr. Barnum — TJncle Barnum — who was 
always " as good as gold " to me. I burst out into a state- 
ment of my griefs, mentioning incidentally that I really 
could not go on as full editor, and do such fearful work on 
the salary of an office-boy. He listened to it all, I am sure 
with amusement, and placing his hand kindly on my shoulder 
as we walked up and down the hall of the Museum, said, 
" You slia'n''t go. Don't get into a funk. I know that you 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. 205 

can do the work, and do it well. And the salary shall be 
doubled — certainly ! " 

So the paper was brought out after all. I had great trouble 
for some time to learn to write editorials. I used to go to the 
office of a Sunday morn, and sit sometimes from ten till two 
turning over the exchanges, and seeking for ideas. It was a 
dreadful ordeal. In fact, in after times it was several years 
before I could seize a pen, rattle up a subject and dash off a 
leader. No'w I can write far more easily than I can talk. 
And it is a curious fact that soon after I became really skilled 
at such extempore work in the opinion of the best judges, 
such as Eaymond, I no longer had any opportunity to prac- 
tice it. 

I had worked only a week or two when a rather queer, 
tall, roughish Yankee was brought into the office. He 
worked for a while, and in a day or two took possession of 
my desk and rudely informed me that he was my superior 
editor and master there. He had, as many men do, mistaken 
amiable politeness for humility. I replied, knowing that 
Mr. Beech, out of sight, was listening to every word, that 
there was no master there but Mr. Beech, and that I should 
keep my desk. We became affable ; but I abode my time, 
for I found that he was utterly incompetent to do the work. 
Very soon he told me that he had an invitation to lecture in 
Philadelphia. I told him that if he wished to go I w^ould 
do all his work for him. So he went, and Mr. Beech com- 
ing in, asked where Mr. was. I replied that he had 

gone away to lecture, and that I was to do his work during 
his absence. This was really too much, and the Yankee was 
dismissed "in short order," the Beeches being men who 
made up their minds promptly and acted vigorously. As 
for me, I never, shirked work of any kind. A gentleman on 
a newspaper never does. The more of a snob a man is, the 
more afraid he is of damaging his dignity, and the more de- 
sirous of being "boss" and captain. But though I have 
terribly scandalised my chief or proprietor by reporting a fire, 
10 



206 MEMOIRS. 

I never found that I was less respected by the typos, reporters, 

and subs. 

I had before leaving Philadelphia published two books. 
One was " The Poetry and Mystery of Dreams," which I 
dedicated to my fiancee. Miss Belle Fisher. The other was 
an odd melange, which had appeared in chapters in the 
Knicherhocker Magazine. It was titled Meister KarVs 
Sketch-Book. It had no great success beyond attaining to a 
second edition long after ; yet Washington Irving praised it 
to everybody, and wrote to me that he liked it so much that 
he kept it by him to nibble ever and anon, like a Stilton 
cheese or a jya/^e de foie gras ; and here and there I have 
known men, like the late Nicolas Triibner or E. L. Bulwer, 
who found a strange attraction in it, but it was emphatically 
caviare to the general reader. It had at least a style of its 
own, which found a few imitators. It ranks, I think, about 
pari passu with Ooryatt's " Crudities," or lower. 

There were two or three salons in New York where there 
were weekly literary receptions, and where one could meet 
the principal writers of the time. I often saw at Kimball's 
and other places the Misses Wetherell, who wrote the " Wide, 
Wide World " and " Queechy." They were elderly, and had 
so very little of the " world " in their ways, that they occurred 
to me as an example of the fact that people generally write 
most on what they know least about. Thus a Lowell factory- 
girl likes to write a tale of ducal society in England ; and 
when a Scotchman has less intelligence of " jocks " and 
" wut " than any of his countrymen, he compiles, and com- 
ments on, American humorists. 

Once there was a grand publishers' dinner to authors 
where I went with Alice and Phcebe Carey, who were great 
friends of mine. There I met and talked with Washington 
Irving; I remember Bryant and N. P. Willis, et totis les 
autres. Just at that time wine, &c., could only be sold in 
New York "in the original packages as imported." Alice 
or Phoebe Carey lamented that wo were to have none at the 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. 207 

banquet. There was a large dish of grapes before her, and I 
said, " Why, there you have plenty of it in the original pack- 
ages ! " 

At that time very hospitable or genial hosts used to place 
a bottle of brandy and glass in the gentlemen's dressing-room 
at an evening's reception, and I remember it was considered 
a scandalous thing when a certain old retired naval officer 
once emptied the whole bottle single-handed. 

Of course I was very intimate with Clark of the Knich- 
erlocke7\ Fred Cozzens, John Godfrey Saxe, and all the com- 
pany of gay and festive humorists who circled about that 
merry magazine. There was never anything quite like the 
Knickerbocker^ and there never will be again. It required a 
sunny, genial social atmosphere, such as we had before the 
war, and never after ; an easy writing of gay and cultivated 
men for one another, and not painfully elaborating jocosities 

or seriosities for the million as in But never mind. It 

sparkled through its summer-time, and oh ! how its readers 
loved it ! I sometimes think that I would like to hunt up 
the old title-plate with Diedrich Knickerbocker and his pipe, 
and issue it again every month to a few dozen subscribers 
who loved quaint odds and ends, till I too should pass away ! 

It was easy enough to foresee that a great illustrated 
weekly, with actually one young man, and generally no 
more, to do all the literary work could not last long. And 
yet the JSfeiu York Times^ or some such journal, said that 
the work was very well done, and that the paper did well 
until I left. Heaven knows that I worked hard enough on 
it, and, what was a great deal to boast of in those days, never 
profited one farthing beyond free tickets to plays, which I 
had little time to use. And yet my pay was simply despicably 
small. I had great temptations to write up certain specu- 
lative enterprises, and never accepted one. Our circulation 
sometimes reached 150,000. And if the publishers (excepting 
Barnum) had ever shown me anything like thanks or kind- 
ness for gratuitous zeal and interest which I took, I could 



208 MEMOIRS. 

have greatly aided them. One day, for instance, I was asked 
to write a description of a new ferry. I went there, and the 
proprietor intimated that he would pay a large sum for an 
article which would point out the advantage or profit which 
would accrue from investing in his lots. I told him that if 
it were really true that such was the case, I would do it for 
nothing, but that I never made money behind my salary. I 
began to weary of the small Yankee greed and griping and 
" thanklessness " which I experienced. There were editors 
in New York who, for less work, earned ten times the salary 
which I received. I Avas not sorry when I heard that some 
utterly inexperienced New England clergyman had been en- 
gaged to take my place. So I returned to Philadelphia. The 
paper very soon came to grief. I believe that with Barnum 
alone I could have made it a great success. We had Frank 
Leslie for chief engraver, and he was very clever and am- 
bitious. I had a knowledge of art, literature, and foreign 
life and affairs, which could have been turned, with Leslie's 
co-operation, to great advantage. I needed an office with a 
few books for reference, at least three or four literary aids, 
and other ordinary absolutely necessary facilities for work. 
All that I literally had was a space half-portioned off from 
the engine-room, where a dozen blackguard boys swore and 
yelled as it were at my elbow, a desk, a chair, and a pair of 
scissors, ink, and paste. This wretched scrimping prevailed 
through the whole business, and thus it w^as expected to es- 
tablish a great first-class American illustrated newspaper. It 
is sometimes forgotten in the United States that to make a 
vast success, something is requisite beyond enterprise and 
economy, and that it is a very poor policy to screw your 
employes down to the last cent, and overwork them, and 
make business needlessly irksome, when they have it in their 
power to very greatly advance your interests. I dwell on this 
because it is a common error everywhere. I have in my 
mind a case in which an employer, who lived "like a prince," 
boasted to me how little he paid his men, and how in the 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. 209 

long-run it turned out bitterly to his loss in many ways. 
Those who had no principle robbed him, while the honest, 
who would have made his interests their own, left him. I 
have seen business after business broken up in this way. 
AYhile the principal is in vigour and life, he may succeed 
with mere servants who are poorly paid ; then, after a time, 
some younger partner, who has learned his morals from the 
master, pushes him out, or he dies, and the business is worth- 
less, because there is not a soul in it who cares for it, or who 
has grown up with any common sense of interest with the 
heirs. 

I remember one day being obliged in New York to listen 
to a conversation between two men of business. One owed 
the other a large sum, honestly enough — of that there was 
no question between them ; but he thought that there was a 
legal way to escape payment, while the other differed from 
him. So they argued away for a long time. There was not 
a word of reproach ; the creditor would have cheated the 
debtor in the same way if he could ; the only point of differ- 
ence was whether it could be done. An employe who can 
remain in such surroundings and be honest must be indeed a 
miracle of integrity, and, if he do not over-reach them in the 
long-run, one of stupidity. I might have made " house and 
land " out of the newspaper had I been so disposed. 

Of all the men wdiom I met in those days in the way of 
business, Mr. Barnum, the great American humbug, was by 
far the honestest and freest from guile or deceit, or " ways 
that were dark, or tricks that were vain." He was very 
kind-hearted and benevolent, and gifted with a sense of fun 
which was even stronger than his desire for dollars. I have 
talked very confidentially with him many times, for he was 
very fond of me, and always observed that to engineer some 
grotesque and startling paradox into tremendous notoriety, 
to make something imiyiensely puzzling with a stupendous 
sell as postscript, was more of a motive with him than even 
the main chance. He w^as a genius like Rabelais, but one 



210 MEMOIRS. 

who employed business and humanity for material instead 
of literature, just as Abraham Lincoln, who was a brother 
of the same band, employed patriotism and politics. All 
three of them expressed vast problems, financial, intellectual, 
or natural, by the brief arithmetic of a joke. Mr. Barnum 
was fearfully busy in those days; Avhat with buying ele- 
phants, wooing two-headed girls for his Grand Combination, 
laying out towns, chartering banks, and inventing unheard- 
of wonders for the unrivalled collection of one hundred and 
fifty million unparalleled moral marvels ; but he always found 
time to act as unpaid contributor to a column of humorous 
items which I always published. I have said that I had no 
assistant ; I forgot that I always had Mr. Barnum as assistant 
humorous editor for that department. All at once, when 
least expected, he would come smiling in with some curiosity 
of literature such as the " reverse " — 

" Lewd did 1 live & evil I did dwel," 

or a fresh conundrum or joke, with all his heart and soul full 
of it, and he would be as delighted over the proof as if to see 
himself in print was a startling novelty. We two had " beau- 
tiful times " over that column, for there was a great deal of 
" boy " still left in Barnum ; nor was I by any means de- 
ficient in it. One thing I set my face against firmly : I 
never would in any way whatever write up, aid, or advertise 
the great show or museum, or cry up the elephant. I was 
resolved to leave the paper first. 

On that humorous column Barnum always deferred to 
me, even as a small school-boy defers to an elder on the ques- 
tion of a game of marbles or hop-scotch. There was no 
affectation or play in it ; we were both quite in earnest. I 
think I see him now, coming smiling in like a harvest-moon, 
big with some new joke, and then we sat down at the desk 
and " edited." How we would sit and mutually and ad- 
miringly read to one another our beautiful " good things," 
the world forgetting, by the world forgot ! And yet I declare 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. 211 

that never till this instant did the great joke of it all ever 
occur to me — that two men of our experiences could be so 
simply pleased ! Those humorous columns, collected and 
republished in a book, might truly bear on the title-page, 
" By Barnum and Hans Breitmann." And we were both of 
the opinion that it really w^ould make a very nice book in- 
deed. We were indeed both " boys " over it at play. 

The entire American press expected, as a matter of course, 
that the Illustrated JVeivs would be simply an advertisement 
for the great showman, and, as I represented to Mr. Barnum, 
this would ere long utterly ruin the publication. I do not 
nov/ really know whether I was quite right in this, but it is 
very much to Mr. Barnum's credit that he never insisted on 
it, and that in his own paper he was conspicuous by his ab- 
sence. And here I will say that, measured by the highest and 
most refined standard, there was more of the gentleman in 
Phineas T. Barnum than the world imagined, and very much 
more than there was in a certain young man in good society 
who once expressed in my hearing disgust at the idea of even 
speaking to " the showman." 

Henry Ward Beecher was a great friend of Barnum and 
the Beaches, of which some one wrote — 

" No wonder Mr. Alfred Beach 
Prefers, as noblest preacher, 
A man who is not only Beach, 
But even more so — Beecher." 

He came very frequently into our office ; but I cannot re- 
call any saying of his worth recording. 

There was also a brother of H. W. Longfellow, a clergy- 
man, who often visited me, of whom I retain a most agree- 
able recollection. 

The newsboys who clustered round the outer door were 
divided in opinion as to me. One party thought I was Mr. 
Barnum, and treated me with profound respect. The other 
faction cried aloud after me, " Hy ! you ! " 

Mr. Barnum wanted me to write his Life. This would 



212 MEMOIRS. 

have been amusing work and profitable, but I shrunk from 
the idea of being identified with it. I might as well have 
done it, for I believe that Dr. Griswold performed the task, 
and the public never knew or cared anything about it. But 
my jolly companions at Dan Bixby's used to inquire of me at 
what hour we fed the monkeys, and whether the Great Gyas- 
cutus ever gave me any trouble ; and I was sensitive to such 
insinuations. 

At this time Mr. Barnum's great moral curiosity was a 
bearded lady, a jolly and not bad-looking Frenchwoman, 
whose beard v>^as genuine enough, as I know, having pulled 
it. My own beard has been described by a French newspaper 
as une harlie de Charlemagne^ a very polite pun, but hers was 
much fuller. It v^as soft as floss silk. After a while the cap- 
illary attraction ceased to draw, and Mr. Barnum thought of 
an admirable plan to revive it. He got somebody to prose- 
cute him for false pretences and imposture, on the ground 
that Madame was a man. Then Mr. Barnum had, with the 
greatest unwillingness and many moral apologies, a medical 
examination ; they might as sensibly have examined Vashisli- 
ta's cow to find out if it was an Irish bull. Then came the 
attack on the impropriety of the whole thing, and finally Mr. 
Barnum's triumphant surrebutter, showing he had most un- 
willingly been goaded by the attacks of malevolent wretches 
into an unavoidable course of defence. Of course, spotless 
innocence came out triumphant. Mr. Barnum's system of 
innocence was truly admirable. When he had concocted some 
monstrous cock-and-bull curiositv, he was wont to advertise 
that " it was with very great reluctance that he presented this 
unprecedented marvel to the world, as doubts had been ex- 
pressed as to its genuineness — doubts inspired by the actually 
apparently incredible amount of attraction in it. All that v/e 
ask of an enlightened and honest public is, that it will pass a 
fair verdict and decide whether it be a humbug or not." So 
the enlightened public paid its quarters of a dollar, and de- 
cided that it IV as a humbug, and Barnum abode by their 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. 213 

decision, and then sent it to another city to be again de- 
cided on. 

I returned to Philadelphia, and to my father's house, and 
occupied myself with such odds and ends of magazine and 
other writing as came in my way, and always reading and 
studying. I was very much depressed at this time, yet not 
daunted. My year in New York had familiarised me with 
characteristic phases of American life and manners ; my fa- 
ther thought I had gone through a severe mill with rather 
doubtful characters, and once remarked that I should not 
judge too harshly of business men, for I had been unusually 
unfortunate in my experience. 

A not unfrequent visitor at our house in Philadelphia was 
our near neighbour, Henry C. Carey, the distinguished scholar 
and writer on political economy, who had been so extensively 
robbed of ideas by Bastiat, and who retook his own, not with- 
out inflicting punishment. He was a handsome, black-eyed, 
white-haired man, with a very piercing glance. During the 
war, when men were sad and dull, and indeed till his death, 
Mr. Carey's one glorious and friendly extravagance was to as- 
semble every Sunday afternoon all his intimates, including 
any distinguished strangers, at his house, round a table, in 
rooms magnificently hung with pictures, and give everybody, 
ad lihitum^ hock which cost him sixteen shillings a bottle. I 
occasionally obliged him by translatiug for him German let- 
ters, &c., and he in return revised my pamphlet on Centrali- 
zation versus State Rights in 1863. H. C. Baird, a very able 
writer of his school, was his nephew. The latter had two or 
three sisters, whom I recall as charming girls while I was a 
law-student. There were many beauties in Philadelphia in 
those days, and prominent at the time, though as yet a school- 
girl, was the since far-famed Emily Schaumberg, albeit I pre- 
ferred Miss Belle Fisher, a descendant maternally of the fa- 
mous Callender beauties, and by her father's side allied to 
Miss Yining, the American Queen of Beauty during the Revo- 
lution at Washington's republican court. There was also a 



214 MEMOIRS. 

Miss Lewis, whose great future beauty I predicted while as 
yet a child, to the astonishment of a few, " which prophecy 
was marvellously fulfilled." Also a Miss Wharton, since de- 
ceased, on whom George Boker after her death wrote an ex- 
quisite poem. The two were, each of their kind, of a beauty 
which I have rarely, if ever, seen equalled, and certainly never 
surpassed, in Italy. How I could extend the list of those too 
good and fair to live, who have passed away from my knowl- 
edge ! — Miss Nannie Grigg — Miss Julia Biddle ! — Mais oil 
sont Us neiges d"* ant an ? 

Thus far my American experiences had not paid well. I 
reflected that if I had remained in Paris I should have done 
far better. When I left, I knew that the success of Louis 
Napoleon was inevitable. Three newspapers devoted to him 
had appeared on the Boulevards in one day. There was 
money at work, and workmen such as lived in the Hotel de 
Luxembourg, gentlemen who could not only plan barricades 
but fight at them, were in great demand, as honest men always 
are in revolutions. Louis Napoleon was very anxious indeed 
to attach to him the men of February, and many who had 
not done one-tenth or one-twentieth of what I had, had the 
door of fortune flung wide open to them. My police-dossier 
would have been literally a diploma of honour under the new 
Empire, for, after all, the men of February, Forty-eight, were 
the ones who led off, and who all bore the highest reputation 
for honour. All that I should have required would have been 
some ambitious man of means to aid — and such men abound 
in Paris — to have risen fast and high. As it turned out, it 
was just as well in the end that I neither went in as a political 
adventurer under Louis Napoleon, nor wrote the Life of Bar- 
num. But no one knew in those days how Louis would 
turn out. 

I have but one w^ord to add to this. The secret of the 
Revolution of February had been in very few hands, which 
was the secret of its success. Any one of us could have 
secured fortune and " honours," or at least " orders," by be- 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. 215 

traying it. But we would as soon have secured orders for the 
pit of hell as done so. This was known to Louis Napoleon, 
and he must have realised who these men of iron integrity 
were, for he was very curious and inquiring on this subject. 
Now, I here claim it as a great, as a surpassing honour for 
France, and as something absolutely without parallel in his- 
tory, that several hundred men could be found who could 
not only keep this secret, but manage so very wisely as they 
did. Louis Blanc was an example of these honest, unselfish 
men. I came to know him personally many years after, 
during his exile in London. 

One morning George H. Boker came to me and informed 
me that there was a writing editor wanted on the Philadel- 
phia Evening Bulletin. Its proprietor was Alexander Cum- 
mings. The actual editor was Gibson Bannister Peacock, 
who was going to Europe for a six months' tour, and some 
one was wanted to take his place. Mr. Peacock, as I sub- 
sequently found, was an excellent editor, and a person of will 
and character. He was skilled in music and a man of culture. 
I retain grateful remembrances of him. I was introduced and 
installed. With all my experience I had not yet quite acquired 
the art of extemporaneous editorial composition. My first 
few weeks were a severe trial, but I succeeded. I was ex- 
pected to write one column of leader every day, review books, 
and " paragraph " or condense articles to a brief item of news. 
In which I succeeded so well, that some time after, when a 
work appeared on writing for the press, the author, who did 
not know me at all, cited one of my leaders and one of my 
paragraphs as models. It actually made little impression on 
me at the time — I was so busy. 

I had been at work but a short time, when one day Mr. 
Cummings received a letter from Mr. Peacock in Europe, 
which he certainly had hardly glanced at, which he threw to 
me to read. I did so, and found in it a passage to this effect : 
" I am sorry that you are disappointed as to Mr. Leland, but 
I am confident that you will find him perfectly capable in 



216 MEMOIRS. 

time." This gave me a bitter pang, but I returned it to Mr. 
Cummings, who soon after came into the oflice and expressed 
frankly his great regret, saying that since he had written to 
Mr. Peacock he had quite changed his opinion. 

I enjoyed this new life to the utmost. Mr. Cummings, 
to tell the truth, pursued a somewhat tortuous course in 
politics and religion. He was a Methodist. One day our 
clerk expressed himself as to the latter in these words : — 
" They say he is a Jumper, but others think he has gone over 
to the Holy Eollers." The Jumpers were a sect whose mem- 
bers, when the Holy Spirit seized them, jumped up and down, 
while the Holy Rollers under such circumstances rolled over 
and over on the floor. We also advocated Native American- 
ism and Temperance, which did not prevent Mr. Peacock 
and myself and a few liahituh of the office from going daily 
at eleven o'clock to a neighbouring lager-beer Wirthschaft 
for a refreshing glass and lunch. One day the bar- tender, 
Hermann, a very nice fellow, said to me, " I remember when 
you always had a bottle of Rudeslieimer every day for dinner. 
That was at Herr Lehr's, in Heidelberg. I always waited 
on you." 

Whoever shall write a history of Philadelphia from the 
Thirties to the end of the Fifties will record a popular period 
of turbulence and outrages so extensive as to now appear 
almost incredible. These were so great as to cause grave 
doubts in my mind whether the severest despotism, guided 
by justice, would not have been preferable to such repub- 
lican license as then prevailed in the city of Penn. I refer to 
the absolute and uncontrolled rule of the Volunteer Fire De- 
partment, which was divided into companies (each having 
clumsy old fire apparatus and hose), all of them at deadly 
feud among themselves, and fighting freely with pistols, 
knives, iron spanners, and slung shot, whenever they met, 
whether at fires or in the streets. Of these regular firemen, 
fifty tliousand were enrolled, and to these might have been 
added almost as many more, who were known as runners, 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. 217 

bummers, and hangers-on. Among the latter were a great 
number of incendiaries, all of whom were well known to and 
encouraged by the firemen. Whenever the latter wished to 
meet some rival company, either to test their mutual skill or 
engage in a fight, a fire was sure to occur; the same always 
happened when a fire company from some other city visited 
Philadelphia. 

This gave occasion to an incredible amount of blackmail- 
ing, since all house-owners were frequently called on to con- 
tribute money to the different companies, sometimes as a 
subscription for ball- tickets or repairs. It was well under- 
stood, and generally pretty plainly expressed, that those who 
refused to pay might expect to be burned out or neglected. 
The result of it all was a general fear of the firemen, a most 
degrading and contemptible subservience to them by politi- 
cians of all kinds, a terrible and general growth and spread 
of turbulence and coarse vulgarity among j'Outh, and finally, 
such a prevalence of conflagration that no one who owned a 
house could hear the awful tones of the bell of Independence 
Hall without terror. Fires were literally of nightly occur- 
rence, and that they were invariably by night was due to the 
incendiary " runner." A slight examination of the news- 
papers and cheap broadside literature of that time will amply 
confirm all that I here state. " Jakey " was the typical fire- 
man ; he was the brutal hero of a vulgar play, and the ideal 
of nineteen youths out of twenty. For a generation or more 
all society felt the degrading influences of this rowdyism in 
almost every circle — for there were among the vast majority 
of men not very many who respected, looked up to, or cared 
for anything really cultured or refined. I have a large col- 
lection of the popular songs of Philadelphia of that time, in 
all of which there is a striving downwards into blackguardism 
and brutality, vileness and ignorance, which has no parallel 
in the literature of any other nation. The French of the 
Pere Duchene school may be nastier, and, as regards aristo- 
crats, as bloody, but for general all-round vulgarity^ the state 



218 MEMOIRS. 

of morals developed among the people at the time of which 
I speak was literally without its like. It is very strange that 
Pliny also speaks of the turbulence or rowdyism of the fire- 
men of Kome. 

I remember that even in Walnut Street, below Thirteenth 
Street, before my father's house (this being then by far the 
most respectable portion of Philadelphia), it happened sev- 
eral nights in succession that rival fire-companies, running 
side by side, fought as they ran, with torches and knives, 
while firing pistols. There was a young lady named Mary 
Bicking, who lived near us. I asked her one day if she had 
ever seen a man shot ; and when she answered " No," I re- 
plied, " Why don't you look out of your window some night 
and see one ? " 

The southern part of the city was a favourite battle- 
ground, and I can remember hearing ladies who lived in 
Pine Street describe how, on Sunday summer afternoons, 
they could always hear, singly or in volleys, the shots of the 
revolvers and shouts of the firemen as they fought in Moya- 
mensing. 

Every effort to diminish these evils, or to improve the 
fire department in any way whatever, was vigorously opposed 
by the rowdies, who completely governed the city. The first 
fire-alarm electric telegraphs were a great offence to firemen, 
and were quietly destroyed ; the steam-engines were regarded 
by them as deadly enemies. But the first great efficient re- 
form in the Philadelphia fire department, and the most radi- 
cal of all, was the establishment of a fire-detective depart- 
ment under a fire-marshal, whose business it was to investi- 
gate and punish all cases of incendiarism. For it was simply 
incendiarism, encouraged and supported by the firemen 
themselves, which caused nineteen-twentieths of all these 
disasters; it was thcfii^es which were the sole support of the 
whole system. 

I was much indebted for understanding all this, and act- 
ing on it boldly, as I did, to the city editor and chief reporter 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. 219 

on the Evening Biilletm^ Caspar Souder. The Mayor of the 
city was Eichard Vaux, a man of good family and education, 
and one who had seen in his tinie cities and men, he having 
once in his youth, on some great occasion, waltzed with the 
Princess — now Queen — Victoria. Being popular, he was 
called Vaux populi. I wrote very often leaders urging 
Mayor Vaux by name to establish a fire-detective depart- 
ment. So great was the indignation caused among the fire- 
men, that I incurred no small risk in writing them. But at 
last, when I published for one week an article every day 
clamouring for a reform, Mayor Vaux — as he said directly to 
Mr. Souder, " in consequence of my appeals " — vigorously 
established a fire-marshal with two aids. By my request, the 
office was bestowed on a very intelligent and well-educated 
person. Dr. Blackburne, who had been a surgeon in the 
Mexican war, then a reporter on our journal, and finally a 
very clever superior detective. He was really not only a born 
detective, but to a marked degree a man of scientific attain- 
ments and a skilled statistician. His anecdotes and com- 
ments as to pyromaniacs of different kinds were as entertain- 
ing and curious as anything recorded by Gaboriau. Some of 
the most interesting experiences of my life were when I went 
with Dr. Blackburne from place to place where efforts had 
been made to burn houses, and noted the unerring and Red- 
Indian skill with which he distinguished the style of work, 
and identified the persons and names of the incendiaries. 
One of these "fire-bugs" was noted for invariably setting 
fire to houses in such a manner as to destroy as many in- 
mates as possible. If there were an exit, he would block it 
up. Dr. Blackburne took me to a wooden house in which 
the two staircases led to a very small vestibule about three 
feet square before the front door. This space had been filled 
with diabolical iugenuity with a barrel full of combustibles, 
so that every one who tried to escape by the only opening 
below would be sure to perish. Fortunately, the combusti- 
bles in the barrel went out after being ignited. " I know 



220 MEMOIRS. 

that fellow by his style," remarked the Doctor, " and I shall 
arrest him at four o'clock this afternoon." 

This fire-detective department and the appointment of 
Blackburne was the real basis and beginning of all the re- 
forms which soon followed, leading to the abolition of the 
volunteer system and the establishment of paid emiiloyes. 
And as I received great credit for it then, my work being 
warmly recognised and known to all the newspaper reporters 
and editors in the city, who were the best judges of it, as they 
indeed are of all municipal matters, I venture to record it 
here as something worth mentioning. And though I may 
truly say that at the time I was so busy that I made no ac- 
count of many such things, they now rise up from time to 
time as comforting assurances that my life has not been quite 
wasted. 

This reminds me that I had not been very long on the 
newspaper, and had just begun to throw out editorials with 
ease, when Mr. Cummings said to me one day that I did not 
realise what a power I held in my hand, but that I would 
soon find it out. Almost immediately after, in noticing some 
article or book which was for sale at No. 24 Chestnut Street, 
I inadvertently made reference to 24 Walnut Street. Very 
soon came the proprietor of the latter place, complaining 
that I had made life a burden to him, because fifty people had 
come in one day to buy something which he had not. I 
reflected long and deeply on this, with the result of observing 
that to influence people it is not at all necessary to argue 
with them, but simply be able to place before their eyes such 
facts as you choose. It is very common indeed to hear people 
in England, who should have more sense, declare that " no- 
body minds what the newspapers say." But the truth is, 
that if any man has an eye to read and memory to retain, he 
mii8t^ willy-nilly, be influenced by reading, and selection 
from others by an able editor is often only a most ingenious 
and artful method of arguing. It has very often happened 
to me, when I wanted to enforce some important point, to 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. 221 

clothe it as an anecdote or innocent " item," and bid the 
foreman set it in the smallest type in the most obscure corner. 
And the reader is influenced by it, utterly unconsciously, 
just as we all are, and just as surely as all reflection follows 
sensation — as it ever will — into the Ages ! 

There was much mutual robbing by newspapers of tele- 
graphic news in those days. Once it befell that just before 
the Bulletin went to press a part of the powder-mills of 
Dupont Brothers in Delaware blew up, and we received a few 
lines of telegram, stating that Mr. Dupont himself had saved 
the great magazine by actually walking on a burning build- 
ing with buckets of water, and preventing the fire from ex- 
tending, at a most incredible risk of his life. Having half- 
an-hour's time, I expanded this telegram into something 
dramatic and thrilling. A great New York newspaper, think- 
ing, from the shortness of time which elapsed in publishing, 
that it was all telegraphed to us, printed it as one of its own 
from Delaware, just as I had written it out — which I freely 
forgive, for verily its review of my last work but one was such 
as to make me inquire of myself in utter amazement, " Can 
this be I ? " — " so gloriously was I exalted to the higher life." 
The result of this review was a sworn and firm determination 
on my part to write another book of the same kind, in which 
I should show myself more worthy of such cordial encourage- 
ment ; which latter book was the " Etruscan Legends." I 
ought indeed to have dedicated it to the Keio Yorh Tribune^ 
a journal which has done more for human freedom than any 
other publication in history. 

I do not know certainly whether the brave Dupont whom 
I mentioned was the Charley Dupont who went to school 
with me at Jacob Pierce's, nor can I declare that a very 
gentlemanly old Frenchman who came to see him in 1832 
was his father or graudfather, the famous old Dupont de 
I'Eure of the French Revolution. But I suppose it was the 
latter who carried and transformed the art of manufacturing 
moral gunpowder in France to the making material explosives 



222 MEMOIRS. 

in America. Yes, moral or physical, we are all but gun- 
powder and smoke — pulvis et umbra sumus ! 

There was a morning paper in Philadelphia which grieved 
me sore by pilfering my news items as I wrote them. So I 
one day gave a marvellous account of the great Volatile 
Chelidonian or Flying Turtle of Surinam, of which a speci- 
men had just arrived in New York. It had a shell as of 
diamonds blent with emeralds and rubies, and bat-like wings 
of iridescent hue surpassing the opal, and a tail like a serpent. 
Our contemporary, nothing doubting, at once published this 
as original matter in a letter from New York, and had to 
bear the responsibility. But I did not invest my inventive- 
ness wisely ; I should have shared the idea with Barnum. 

There was in Philadelphia at this time a German book- 
seller named Christern. It was the thought of honourable 
and devoted men which recalled him to my mind. I had 
made his acquaintance long before in Munich, where he had 
been employed in the principal bookseller's shop of the city. 
His " store " in Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, became a kind 
of club, where I brought such of my friends as were interested 
in German literature. We met there and talked German, 
and examined and discussed all the latest European w^orks. 
He had a burly, honest, rather droll assistant named Kuhl, 
who had been a student in Munich, then a Eevolutionist and 
exile, and finally a refugee to America. To this shop, too, 
came Andrekovitch, whom I had last known in Paris as a 
speculator on the Bourse, wearing a cloak lined with sables. 
In America he became a chemical manufacturer. When at 
last an amnesty was proclaimed, his brother asked him to 
return to Poland, promising a support, which he declined. 
He too was an honourable, independent man. About this 

time the great 1 forget his name ; or was it Schoffel ? — 

who had been President of the Frankfort Kevolutionary 
Parliament, opened a lager-beer establishment in Race Street. 
I went there several times with Ruhl. 

George Boker and Frank Wells, who subsequently sue- 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. 223 

ceeded me on the Btdletin, would drop in every day after the 
first edition had gone to press, and then there would be a 
lively time. Frank Wells was, j!?ar eminence^ the greatest 
jDunster Philadelphia ever produced. He was in this respect 
appalling. We had a sub-editor or writer named Ernest 
Wallace, who was also a clever humorist. One day John 
Godfrey Saxe came in. He was accustomed among country 
auditors and in common sanctums to carry everything before 
him with his jokes. In half-an-hour we extinguished him. 
Having declared that no one could make a pun on his name, 
which he had not heard before, Wallace promptly replied, 
" It's axing too much, I presume ; but did you ever hear 
that ? " Saxe owned that he had not. 

George H. Boker, whose name deserves a very high place 
in American literature as a poet, and in history as one who 
was of incredible service, quietly performed, in preserving 
the Union during the war, was also eminently a wit and 
humorist. We always read first to one another all that we 
wrote. He had so trained himself from boyhood to self- 
restraint, calmness, and the nil admirari air, which, as Dallas 
said, is " the Corinthian ornament of a gentleman " (I may 
add especially when of Corinthian brass), that his admirable 
jests, while they gained in clearness and a^Dplicability, lost 
something of that rattle of the impromptu and headlong 
which renders Irish and Western humour so easy. I recorded 
the hon 7nots and merry stories which passed among us all in 
the sanctum in articles for our weekly newspaper, under the 
name of " Social Hall Sketches " (a social hall in the West is 
a steamboat smoking-room). Every one of us received a 
name. Mr. Peacock was Old Hurricane, and George Boker, 
being asked what his j^seudonym should be, selected that of 
Bullfrog. These " Social Hall Sketches " had an extended 
circulation in American newspapers, some for many years. 
One entirely by me, entitled " Opening Oysters," is to be 
found in English almanacs, &c., to this day. 

It was, I think, or am sure, in 1855 that some German in 



22A MEMOIRS. 

Pennsylvania, instead of burying his deceased wife, burned 
the body. This called forth a storm of indignant attack in 
the newspapers. It was called an irreligious, indecent act. 
I wrote an editorial in which I warmly defended it. Ac- 
cording to Bulwer in the " Last Days of Pompeii," the early 
Christians practised it. Even to this day urns and torches 
are common symbols in Christian burying-grounds, and we 
speak of " ashes " as more decent than mouldering corpses. 
And, finally, I pointed out the great advantage which it 
would be to the coal trade of Pennsylvania. A man of cul- 
ture said to me that it was the boldest editorial which he had 
ever read. Such as it was, I believe that it was the first arti- 
cle written in modern times advocating cremation. If I am 
wrong, I am willing to be corrected. 

To those who are unfamiliar with it, the life in an Amer- 
ican newspaper ofl[ice seems singularly eventful and striking. 
A friend of mine who visited a sanctum (ours) for the first 
time, said, as he left, that he had never experienced such an 
interesting hour in his life. Firstly^ came our chief city 
reporter, exulting in the manner in which he had circum- 
vented the police, and, despite all their efforts, got, by ways that 
were dark, at all the secrets of a brand-new horrible murder. 
Secondly^ a messenger with an account of how I, individ- 
ually, had kicked up the very devil in the City Councils, and 
set the Mayor to condemning us, by a leader discussing cer- 
tain municipal abuses. Thirdly^ another, to tell how I had 
swept one-half the city by an article exposing its neglect, 
and how the sweepers and dirt-carts were busy where none 
had been before for weeks, and how the contractor for cleaning 
wanted to shoot me. Foiirtlily^ a visit from some great dig- 
nitary, who put his dignity very much a Vabri in his pocket, 
to solicit a j^ulf. Fifthly, a lady who, having written a very 
feeble volume of tales which had merely been gently com- 
mended in our columns, came round in a rage to shame me 
by sarcasm, begging me as a parting shot to at least read a 
few lines of her work. Sixthly, a communication from a 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. 225 

great New York family, who, having been requested to send 
a short description of a remarkable wedding-cake, sent me 
one hundred mid fifty pages of minute history of all their 
ancestors and honours, with strict directions that not a line 
should be omitted, and the article printed at once most con- 
spicuously.* Seventhly^ . . . but this is a very mild speci- 
men of what went on all the time during office-hours. And 
on this subject alone I could write a small book. 

Now, at this time there came about a very great change 
in my life, or an event which ultimately changed it alto- 
gether. My father had, for about two years past, fallen into 
a very sad state of mind. His large property between Chest- 
nut and Bank Streets paid very badly, and his means became 
limited. I v/as seriously alarmed as to his health. My dear 
mother had become, I may say, paralytic ; but, in truth, the 
physicians could never explain the disorder. To the last she 
maintained her intellect, and a miraculous cheerfulness un- 
impaired. 

All at once a strange spirit, as of new life, came suddenly 
over my father. I cannot think of it without awe. He 
went to work like a young man, shook off his despair, finan- 
ciered with marvellous ability, borrowed money, collected old 
and long-despaired of debts, tore down the old hotel and the 
other buildings, planned and bargained with architects — it 
was then that I designed the fagade before described — and 
built six stores, two of them very handsome granite buildings, 
on the old site. In short, he made of it a very valuable 
estate. And as he superintended with great skill and ability 
the smallest details of the building, which was for that time 
re*hiarkably well executed, I thought I recognised whence it 
was that I derived the strongly developed tendency for 
architecture which I have always possessed. I have since 
made 400 copies of old churches in England. 

This was a happy period, when life was without a cloud. 



* (Here I forgot myself — this occurred in New York.) 



226 MEMOIRS. 

excepting my mother's trouble. As my father could now well 
afford it, he made me an allowance, which, with my earnings 
from the Bulletin and other occasional literary work, justified 
me in getting married. I had had a long but still very 
happy engagement. So we were married by the Episcopal 
ceremony at the house of my father-in-law in Tenth Street, 
and a very happy wedding it was. I remember two incidents. 
Before the ceremony, tlie Reverend Mr., subsequently 
Bishop Wilmer, took me, with George Boker, into a room 
and explained to me the symbolism of the marriage-ring. 
JSTow, if there was a subject on earth which I, the old friend 
of Oreuzer of Heidelberg, and master of Friedrich's Sym- 
dolik^ and Durandus, and the work " On Finger-Rings," 
knew all about, it was that; and I never shall forget the 
droll look which Boker threw at me as the discourse pro- 
ceeded. But I held my peace, though sadly tempted to set 
forth my own archaeological views on the subject. 

The second v/as this : Philadelphia, as Mr. Philipps has 
said, abounds in folk-lore. Some one suggested that the 
wedding would be a lucky one because there was only one 
clergyman present. But I remarked that among our col- 
oured waiters there was one who had a congregation (my 
wife's cousin, by the way, had a coloured bishop for coach- 
man). However, this sable cloud did not disturb us. 

"VVe went to New York, and were visited by many friends, 
and returned to Philadelphia. We lived for the first year at 
the La Pierre Hotel, where we met with many pleasant peo- 
ple, such as Thackeray, Thalberg, Ole Bull, Mr. and Mrs. 
Ohoteau, of St. Louis, and others. Of Thalberg I have 
already remarked, in my notes to my translation of Heine's 
Salon^ that he impressed me as a very gentlemanly, dignified, 
and quietly remarkable man, whom it would be difficult 
to readily or really understand. " He had unmistakably 
the manner peculiar to many great Germans, which, as I 
have elsewhere observed, is perceptible in the maintien and 
features of Goethe, Humboldt, Bismarck," and Brugsch, of 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. 227 

Berlin (whom I learned to know in later years). Thalberg 
gave me the impression, which grew on me, of a man who 
*knew many things besides piano-playing, and that he was 
born to a higher specialty. He was dignified but affable. 
I remember that one day, when he, or some one present, 
remarked that his name was not a common one, I made him 
laugh by declaring that it occurred in two pieces in an old 
German ballad : — 

" Ich that am Berge stehen, 
Und schaute in das Thal ; 
Da hab' ich sie gesehen, 
Zum aller ietzten mal." 

" I stood upon the mountain^ 
And looked the valley o'er ; 
There I indeed beheld her, 
But saw her never more." 

Thalberg's playing was marvellously like his character or 
himself : Heine calls it gentlemanly. Thackeray was marked 
in his manner, and showed impulse and energy in small utter- 
ances. I may err, but I do not think he could have endured 
solitude or too much of himself. He was eminently social, 
and rather given at times to reckless (not deliberate or spite- 
ful), sarcastic or " ironic " sallies, in which he did not, with 
Americans, generally come oS " first best." There was a 
very beautiful lady in Boston with whom the great novelist 
was much struck, and whom he greatly admired, as he sent 
her two magnificent bronzes. Having dined one eveniDg at 
her house, he remarked as they all entered the dining-room, 
" Now I suppose that, according to your American custom, 
we shall all put our feet up on the chimney-piece." " Cer- 
tainly," replied his hostess, " and as your legs are so much 
longer than the others, you may put your feet on top of the 
looking-glass," which was about ten feet from the ground. 
Thackeray, I was told, was offended at this, and showed it ; 
he being of the " give but not take " kind. One day he said 
to George Boker, when both were looking at Diirer's etching 



228 MEMOIRS. 

of " Death, Knight, and the Devil," of which I possess a fine 
copy, " Every man has liis devil whom he cannot overcome ; 
I have two — laziness, and love of j^leasure." I remarked, 
"Then why the devil seek to overcome them? Is it not 
more noble and sensible to yield where resistance is in vain, 
than to fight to the end ? Is it not a maxim of war, that he 
who strives to defend a defenceless place must be put to 
death ? Why not give in like a man ? " 

I had just published my translation of Heine's ReiseMlder^ 
and Bayard Taylor had a copy of it. He went in company 
v/ith Thackeray to New York, and told me subsequently that 
they had read the work aloud between them alternately with 
roars of laughter till it Vv^as finished ; that Thackeray praised 
my translation to the skies, and that his comments and droll 
remarks on the text were delightful. Thackeray was a per- 
fect German scholar, and well informed as to all in the book. 

Apropos of Heine, Ole Bull had known him very well, 
and described to me his brilliancy in the most distinguished 
literary society, where in French the German wit bore away 
the palm from all Frenchmen. " He flashed and sprayed in 
brilliancy like a fountain." Ole Bull by some chance had 
heard much of me, and we became intimate. He told me 
that I had unwittingly been to him the cause of great loss. 
I had, while in London, become acquainted with an odd and 
rather scaly fish, a German who had been a courier, who was 
the keeper of a small cafe near Leicester Square, and who 
enjoyed a certain fame as the inventor of the poses plastiqices 
or living statues, so popular in 1848. This man soon came 
over to America, and called on me, wanting to borrow money, 
whereupon I gave him the cold shoulder. According to Ole 
Bull, he went to the great violinist, represented himself as 
my friend and as warmly commended by me, and the heed- 
less artist, instead of referring to me directly, took him as 
impresario ; the result being that he ere long ran away with 
the money, and, what was quite as bad, Ole Bull's prima- 
donna, who was, as I understood, specially dear to him. Ole 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. 229 

Bull's playing has been, as I think, much underrated by cer- 
tain writers of reminiscences. There was in it a marvellous 
originality. 

While I was there, in the La Pierre Hotel, the first great 
meeting was held at which the Republican party was organ- 
ised. Though not an appointed delegate from our State, I, 
as an editor, took some part in it. Little did we foresee the 
tremendous results which Avere to ensue from that meeting ! 
It was second only to the signing of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, and on it was based the greatest struggle known 
to history, I could have, indeed, been inscribed as a consti- 
tutional member of it for the asking or writing my name, 
but that appeared to me and others then to be a matter of 
no consequence compared to the work in hand. So the 
Bulletin became Republican ; Messrs. Cummings and Pea- 
cock seeing that that was their manifest destiny. 

From that day terrible events began to manifest them- 
selves in American politics. The South attempted to seize 
Kansas with the aid of border ruflSans ; Sumner was caned 
from behind while seated ; the Southern press became out- 
rageous in its abuse of the North, and the North here and 
there retaliated. All my long-suppressed ardent Abolition 
spirit now found vent, and for a time I was allowed to write 
as I pleased. A Richmond editor paid me the compliment 
of saying that the articles in the Bidletin were the bitterest 
and cleverest published in the North, but inquired if it was 
wise to manifest such feeling. I, who felt that the great 
strife was imminent, thought it was. Mr. Cummings 
thought differently, and I was checked. For years there 
were many who believed that the fearfully growing cancer 
could be cured with rose-water ; as, for instance, Edward 
Everett. 

While on the Bulletin I translated Heine's Pictures of 
Travel. For it, poetry included, I was to receive three shil- 
lings a page. Even this was never paid me in full ; I was 
obliged to take part of the money in engravings and books, 
11 



230 MEMOIRS. 

and the publisher failed. It passed into other hands, and 
many thousands of copies were sold ; from all of which I, of 
course, got nothing. I also became editor of Graham^s 
Magazine^ which I filled recklessly with all or any kind of 
literary matter as I best could, little or nothing being allowed 
for contributions. However, I raised the circulation from 
almost nothing to 17,000. For this I received fifty dollars 
(£10) per month. When I finally left it, the proprietors 
were eighteen months in arrears due, and tried to evade pay- 
ment, though I had specified a regular settlement every 
month. Finally they agreed to pay me in monthly instal- 
ments of fifty dollars each, and fulfilled the engagement. 

Talking of the South, I forget now at what time it was 
that Barnum's Museum in Philadelphia was burned, but I 
shall never forget a droll incident which it occasioned. Op- 
posite it was a hotel, and the heat was so tremendous that 
the paint on the hotel was scorched, and it had begun to burn 
in places. By the door stood a friend of mine in great dis- 
tress. I asked what was the matter. He replied that in the 
hotel was a Southern lady who would not leave her trunks, 
in which there were all her diamonds and other valuables, 
and that he could not find a porter to bring them down. I 
was strong enough in those days. " What is the number 
of her room ? " " No. 22." I rushed up — it was scorching 
hot by this time — burst into No. 22, and found a beautiful 
young lady in dire distress. I said abruptly, "I come from 
Mr. ; where are your trunks ? " She began to cry con- 
fusedly, "Oh, you can do nothing; they are very heavy." 
Seeing the two large trunks, I at once, without a word, 
caught one by each handle, dragged them after me bumping 
downstairs, the lady following, to the door, where I found my 
friend, who had a carriage in waiting. From the lady's sub- 
sequent account, it appeared that I had occasioned her much 
more alarm than pleasure. She said that all at once a great 
tall gentleman burst into her room, seized her trunks without 
a word of apology, and dragged them downstairs like a giant ; 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. 231 

she was never so startled in all her life ! It was explained to 
me that, as in the South only negroes handle trunks, the lady 
could not regard me exactly as a gentleman. She was within 
a short ace of being burnt up, trunks and. all, but could not 
forget that she was from the " Sa-outh," and must needs 
show it. 

Apropos of this occurrence, I remember something odd 
which took place on the night of the same day. There was a 
stylish drinking-place, kept by a man named Guy, in Seventh 
Street. In the evening, when it was most crowded, there en- 
tered a stranger, described as having been fully seven feet 
high, and powerful in proportion, who kept very quiet, but 
who, on being chaffed as the giant escaped from Barnum's 
Museum, grew angry, and ended by clearing out the bar- 
room — driving thirty men before him like flies. Aghast at 
such a tremendous feat, one who remained, asked, " Who in 
God's wrath are you ? — haven't you a name ? " 

" Yes, I have a name," replied the Berserker ; "/'m 
Charles Leland ! " saying which he vanished. 

The next day it was all over Philadelphia that I had 
cleared out John Guy's the night before, sans 7nerci. True, 
I am not seven feet high, but some men (like stories) expand 
enormously when inflated or mad ; so my denial was attrib- 
uted to sheer modesty. But I recognised in the Charles 
Leland a mysterious cousin of mine, who was really seven 
feet high, who had disappeared for many years, and of whom 
I have never heard since. 

While editing Graham'' s Magazine^ I had one day a space 
to fill. In a hurry I knocked off " Hans Breitmann's Barty " 
(1856). I gave it no thought whatever. Soon after, Clark 
republished it in tlie Knickerhocker^ saying that it was evi- 
dently bv me. I little dreamed that in davs to come I should 
be asked in Egypt, and on the blue Mediterranean, and in 
every country in Europe, if I was its author. I wrote in those 
days a vast number of such anonymous drolleries, many of 
them, I daresay, quite as good, in Graham's Magazine and 



232 MEMOIRS. 

the Weekly Bulletin, &c., but I took no heed of them. They 
were probably appropriated iu due time by the authors of 
" Beautiful Snow." 

I began to weary of Philadelphia. New York was a wider 
field and more congenial to me. Mr. Cummings had once, 
during a financial crisis, appealed to my better feelings very 
touchingly to let my salary be reduced. I let myself be 
touched — in the pocket. Better times came, but my salary 
did not rise. Mr. Cummings, knowing that my father was 
wealthy, wanted me to put a large sum into his paper, assur- 
ing me that it would pay me fifteen per cent. I asked how 
that could be possible when he could only afPord to pay me so 
very little for such hard work. He chuckled, and said, 
" That is the way we make our money." Then I determined 
to leave. 

Mr. George Eipley and Charles A. Dana, of the Tribune, 
were then editing in New York Appletons'' Cyclo20CBdia. Mr. 
Ripley had several times shown himself my friend ; he be- 
longed to the famous old baud of Boston Transcendental- 
ists who were at Brook Farm. I wrote to him asking if I 
could earn as much at the Cyclopcedia as I got from the 
Bulletin. He answered affirmatively ; so we packed up and 
departed. I had a sister in New York who had married a 
Princeton College-mate named Thorp. We went to their 
house in Twenty-second Street near Broadway, and arranged 
it so as to remain there during the winter. 

In the Cyclopcedia rooms I found abundance of work, 
though it was less profitable than I expected. For after an 
article was written, it passed through the hands of six or 
seven revisers, who revised not always wisely, and frequently 
far too well. They made their objections in writing, and we, 
the writers, made ours. I often gained a victory, but the vic- 
tory cost a great deal of Avork, and of time which was not paid 
for. Altogether, I wrote about two hundred articles, great 
and small, for the Cyclopcedia. On the other hand, there 
was pleasant and congenial society among my fellow-work- 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. 233 

men, and the labour itself Avas immensely instructive. If 
any man wishes to be well informed, let him work on a cyclo- 
paedia. As I could .read several languages, I was addition- 
ally useful at times. The greatest conciseness of style is re- 
quired for such work. In German cyclopaedias this is carried 
to a fault. 

After a while I began to find that there was much more 
money to be made outside the Cyclojicedia than in it. Wil- 
liam H. Hurlbut, whom I had once seen so nearly shot, had 
been the "foreign editor" of the Neio York Times. Mr. 
Henry Kaymond, its proprietor, had engaged a Mr. Ham- 
mond to come after some six months to take his place, and I 
was asked to fill it ad interim.. I did so, so much to Mr. 
Eayraond's satisfaction, that he much regretted when I left 
that he had not previously engaged me. He was always very 
kind to me. He said that now and then, whenever he 
wanted a really superior art criticism, I should write it. He 
was quite right, for there Avere not many reporters in New 
York who had received such an education in sesthetics as 
mine. When Patti made her delut in opera for the first 
time, I was the only writer w^ho boldly predicted that she 
would achieve the highest lyrical honours or become a " star " 
of the first magnitude. Apropos of Hurlbut, I heard many 
years after, in England, that a certain well-known litterateur^ 
who was not one of his admirers, having seen him seated in 
close tete-a-tete with a very notorious and unpopular charac- 
ter, remarked regretfully, " Just to think that with one pis- 
tol-bullet both might have been settled ! " Hurlbut was, even 
as a boy, very handsome, with a pale face and black eyes, and 
extremely clever, heing facile pri7iceps, the head of every class, 
and extensively read. But there was " a screw loose " some- 
where in him. He was subject, but not very frequently, to 
such fits of passion or rage, that he literally became blind while 
they lasted. I saw him one day in one of these throw his 
arms about and stamp on the ground, as if unable to behold 
any one. I once heard a young lady in ISTew York profess 



234 MEMOIRS. 

unbounded admiration for him, because "he looked so 
charmingly like the devil." For many years the New York 
Herald always described him as the Keverend Mephistopheles 
Hurlbut. There was another very beautiful lady who after- 
wards died a strange and violent death, as also a friend of 
mine, an editor in New York, both of whom narrated to me 
at very great length " a grotesque Iliad of the Avild career " 
of this remarkable man. 

It never rains but it pours. Frank Leslie, who had been 
with me on Barnum's Illustrated Neivs, was now publishing 
half-a-dozen periodicals and newspapers, and offered me a 
fair price to give him my mornings. I did so. Unfor- 
tunately, my work was not specified, and he retained his old 
editors, who naturally enough did not want me, although they 
treated me civilly enough. One of these was Thomas Powell, 
who had seen a great deal of all the great English Avriters 
of the last generation. But there was much rather shady, 
shaky Bohemianism about the frequenters of our sanctum, 
and, all things considered, it was a pity that I ever entered 
it. 

U?id noch zveiter. There was published in New York at 
that time (1860) an illustrated comic weekly called Vanity 
Fair. There was also in the city a kind of irregular club 
known as the Bohemians, w^ho had been inspired by Murger's 
novel of that name to imitate the life of its heroes. They 
met every evening at a lager-beer restaurant kept by a Ger- 
man named Pfaff. For a year or two they made a great sen- 
sation in New York. Their two principal men were Henry 
Clapp and Fitz-James O'Brien. Then there w^ere Frank 
Wood and George Arnold, W. Winter, C. Gardette, and 
others. Wood edited Vanity Fair, and all the rest contrib- 
uted to it. There was some difficulty or other between Wood 
and Mr. Stephens, the gera7it of the weekly, and Wood left, 
followed by all the clan. I was called in in the emergency, 
and what with writing myself, and the aid of E. H. Stoddard, 
T. B. Aldrich, and a few more, we made a very creditable 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. 235 

appearance indeed. Little by little the Bohemians all came 
back, and all went well. 

Now I must here specify, for good reasons, that I held 
myself very strictly aloof from the Bohemians, save in busi- 
ness affairs. This was partly because I was married, and I 
never saw the day in my life when to be regarded as a real 
Bohemian vagabond, or shiftless person, would not have 
given me the horrors. I would have infinitely preferred the 
poorest settled employment to such life. I mention this be- 
cause a very brilliant and singular article entitled *' Charles 
G. Leland Vennemi des AlUmands'''* (this title angered me), 
which appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1871, 
speaks of me by implication as a frequenter of Pfaff's, declar- 
ino- that I there introduced Artemus Ward to the Bohemian 
brotherhood, and that it was entirelv due to me that Mr. 
Browne was brought out before the American world. This 
is quite incorrect. Mr. Browne had made a name by two or 
three very popular sketches before I had ever seen him. But 
it is very true that I aided him to write, and suggested and 
encouraged the series of sketches which made him famous, 
as he himself frankly and generously declared, for Charles 
Browne was at heart an honest gentleman, if there ever was 
one ; which is the one thing in life better than success. 

Mr. Stephens realising that I needed an assistant, and ob- 
serving that Browne's two sketches of the Showman's letter 
and the Mormons had made him well known, invited him to 
take a place in our office. He was a shrewd, naif, but at the 
same time modest and unassuming young man. He was a 
native of Maine, but familiar with the West. Quiet as he 
seemed, in three wrecks he had found out everything in New 
York. I could illustrate this by a very extraordinary fact, 
but I have not space for everything. I proposed to him to 
continue his sketches. " Write," I said, " a paper on the 
Shakers." He replied that he knew nothing about them. 
I had been at Lenox, Massachusetts, where I had often gone 
to New Lebanon and seen their strange worship and dances, 



236 MEMOIRS. 

and while on the Illustrated Netvs had had a conference 
with their elders on an article on the Shakers. So I told him 
what I knew, and he wrote it, making it a condition that I 
would correct it. He wrote the sketch, and others. He was 
very slow at composition, which seemed strange to me, who 
was accustomed to write everything as I now do, currente 
calamo (having written all these memoirs, so far, within a 
month — more or less, and certainly very little more). From 
this came his book. 

When he wrote the article describing his imprisonment, 
there was in it a sentence, " Jailor, I shall die unless you 
bring me something to eat ! " In the proof we found, " I 
shall die unless you bring me something to talk.'''' He was 
just going to correct this, when I cried, " For Heaven's sake, 
Browne, let that stand ! It's best as it is." He did so, and 
so the reader may find it in his work. 

Meanwhile the awful storm of war had gathered and was 
about to burst. I may here say that there was a kind of lit- 
erary club or association of ladies and gentlemen who met 
once a week of evenings in the Studio Buildings, where I had 
many friends, such as Van Brunt, 0. Gambrell, Hazeltine, 
Bierstadt, Gifford, Church, and Mignot. At this club I con- 
stantly met General Birney, the great Abolitionist, whose 
famous charge at Gettysburg did so much to decide the bat- 
tle. Constant intercourse with him and with C. A. Dana 
greatly inspired me in my anti-slavery views. The manager 
of Vanity Fair was very much averse to absolutely commit- 
ting the journal to Kepublicanism, and I was determined on 
it. I had a delicate and very difficult path to pursue, and I 
succeeded, as the publication bears witness. I went several 
times to Mr. Dana, and availed myself of his shrewd advice. 
Browne, too, agreed pretty fairly with me. I voted for Abra- 
ham Lincoln at the first election in New York. I voted on 
princi^jley for I confess that every conceivable thing had been 
said and done to represent him as an ignorant, ungainly, 
silly Western Hoosier, and even the Republican press had 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. 237 

little or nothing to say as to his good qualities. Horace 
Greeley had " sprung him " on the Convention at the eleventh 
hour and fifty-ninth minute as the only available man, and 
he had been chosen as our candidate to defeat Douglas. 

Let me here relate two anecdotes. When my brother 
heard of Lincoln's " candidacy " he said — 

" I don't see why the people shouldn't be allowed to have 
a President for once." 

A Copperhead friend of mine, who was always aiming at 
" gentility," remarked to me with an air of disgust on the 
same subject — 

" I do wisM we could have a gentleman for President for 
oncet.''^ 

The said Copperhead became in due time a Eepublican 
office-holder, and is one yet. 

Lincoln was elected. Then came the storm. Our rejoic- 
ings were short. Sumter was fired on. Up to that time 
everybody, including President Lincoln, had quite resolved 
that, if the South was resolved to secede, it must be allowed 
to depart in peace. There had been for many years a con- 
viction that our country was growing to be too large to hold 
together. I always despised the contemptible idea. I had 
been in correspondence wdth the Eussian Iskander or Alex- 
ander Herzen, who was a century in advance of his time. 
He was the real abolisher of serfdom in Eussia, as history 
will yet prove. I once wrote a very long article urging the Eus- 
sian Government to throw open the Ural gold mines to for- 
eigners, and make every effort to annex Chinese territory and 
open a port on the Pacific. Herzen translated it into Eussian 
(I have a copy of it), and circulated twenty thousand copies 
of it in Eussia. The Czar read it. Herzen wrote to me : 
" It will be pigeon-holed for forty years, and then perhaps 
acted on. The Pacific will be the Mediterranean of the fu- 
ture." With such ideas I did not believe in the dismember- 
ment of the United States.* 

* Herzen once sent me a complete collection of all his books. 



238 MEMOIRS. 

But Sumter was fired on, and the whole North rose in 
fnry. It was the silliest act ever committed. The South, 
with one- third of the votes, had two-thirds of all the civil, 
military, and naval appointments, and every other new 
State, and withal half of the North, ready to lick its boots, 
and still was not satisfied. It could not go without giving 
us a thrashing. And that was the drop too much. So 
we fought. And we conquered ; but lioio 9 It was all 
expressed in a few words, which I heard uttered by a com- 
mon man at a Bulletin board, on the dreadful day when we 
first read the news of the retreat at Bull Run : " It's hard— 
but we must buckle up and go at it again." It is very strange 
that the South never understood that among the mud-sills 
and toiling slaves and factory serfs of the North the spirit 
which had made men enrich barren New England and colo- 
nise the Western wilderness would make them buckle up and 
go at it again boldly to the bitter end. 

One evening I met 0. A. Dana on Broadway. War had 
fairly begun. " It will last," he said, " not less than four 
years, but it may extend to seven." 

Trouble now came thick and fast. Vanity Fair was 
brought to an end. Frank Leslie found that he no longer 
required my services, and paid my due, which was far in 
arrears, in his usual manner, that is, by orders on advertisers 
for goods which I did not want, and for which I was charged 
double prices. Alexander Cummings had a very ingenious 
method of " shaving " when obliged to pay his debts. His 
friend Simon Cameron had a bank — the Middleton — which, 
if not a very wild cat, was far from tam.e, as its notes were 
always five or ten per cent, below par, to our loss — for we were 
always paid in Middleton. I have often known the clerk to 
take a handful of notes at par and send out to buy Middle- 
ton wherewith to pay me. I am sorry to say that such tricks 
were universal among the very great majority of proprietors 
with whom I had dealings. To " do " the employes to the 
utmost was considered a matter of course, especially when 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. 239 

the one employed was a " literary fellow " of any kind or an 
artist. 

I should mention that while in New York I saw a great 
deal of Bayard Taylor and his wife. I had known him since 
1850, and was intimate with him till his death. He oc- 
cupied the same house with the distinguished poet E. H. 
Stoddard. I experienced from both much kindness. We 
had amusing Saturday evenings there, where droll plays 
were improvised, and admirable disguises made out of any- 
thing. In after years, in London, Walter H. Pollock, Minto 
(recently deceased), and myself, did the same. One night, 
in the latter circle, we played Hamlet^ but the chief char- 
acter was the Sentinel, who stared at the Ghost with such 
open-jawed liorror — " houche heante^ recMgnez I " — and so 
prominently, that poor Hamlet was under a cloud. Pollock's 
great capuchon overcoat served for all kinds of mysterious 
characters. We were also kindly entertained many a time 
and oft in New York by Mr. and Mrs. Charles A. Dana. 

My engagement expired on the Times — where, by the 

way, I was paid in full in good money — and I found myself 
without employment in a fearful financial panic. During 
the spring and early summer we had lived at the Gramercy 
Park Hotel ; we now went to a very pleasant boarding-house 
kept by Mrs. Dunn, on Staten Island. My old friend, 
George Ward, and G. W. Curtis, well known in literature 
and politics (who had been at Mr. Greene's school), lived at 
no great distance from us. The steamboats from New York 
to Staten Island got to racing, and I enjoyed it very much, 
but George Ward and some of the milder sort protested 
against it, and it was stopped ; which I thought rather hard, 
for we had very little amusement in those dismal days. I 
was once in a steamboat race when our boat knocked away 
the paddle-box from the other and smashed the wheel. 
Prom the days of the Eomans and Norsemen down to the 
present time, there was never any form of amusement dis- 
covered so daring, so dangerous, and so exciting as a steam- 



240 MEMOIRS. 

boat race, and nobody but Americans could have ever in- 
vented or indulged in it. 

The old Knicherhocker Magazine had been for a long 
time running down to absolutely nothing. A Mr. Gilmore 
purchased it, and endeavoured to galvanise it into life. Its 
sober grey-blue cover was changed to orange. Mr. Clark left 
it, to my sorrow ; but there was no help for it, for there was 
not a penny to pay him. I consented to edit it for half 
ownership, for I had an idea. This was, to make it promptly 
a strong Republican monthly for the time, which was utterly 
opposed to all of Mr. Clark's ideas. 

I must here remark that the financial depression in the 
North at this time was terrible. I knew many instances in 
which landlords begged it as a favour from tenants that they 
would remain rent-free in their houses. A friend of mine, 
Mr. Fales, one day took me over two houses in Fifth 
Avenue, of which he had been offered his choice for 115,000 
each. Six months after the house sold for $150,000. Fac- 
tories and shops were everywhere closing, and there was a 
general feeling that far deeper and more terrible disasters 
were coming — war in its worst forms — national disintegra- 
tion—utter ruin. This spirit of despair was now debilitating 
everybody. The Copperheads or Democrats, who were with- 
in a fraction as numerous as the Republicans, continually 
hissed, " You see to what your nigger worship has brought 
the country. This is all your doing. And the worst is to 
come." Then there was soon developed a class known as 
Croakers, who increased to the end of the war. These were 
good enough Union people, but without any hope of any happy 
issue in anything, and Avho were quite sure that everything 
was for the worst in this our most unfortunate of all wretched 
countries. Now it is a law of humanity that in all great 
crises, or w^ienever energy and manliness is needed, pes- 
simism is a benumbing poison, and the strongest optimism 
the very elixir vitcs itself. And by a marvellously strange 
inspiration (though it was founded on cool, far-sighted calcu- 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. 241 

lation), I, at this most critical and depressing time, rose to 
extremest hope and confidence, rejoicing that the great crisis 
had at length come, and feeling to my very depths of convic- 
tion that, as we were sublimely in the right, we must conquer, 
and that the dread portal once passed we should find our- 
selves in the fairy palace of prosperity and freedom. But 
that I was absolutely for a time alone amid all men round 
me, in this intense hope and confidence, may be read as 
clearly as can be in what I and others published in those 
days, for all of this was recorded in type. 

Bayard Taylor had been down to the front, and remarked 
carelessly to me one day that when he found that there was 
already a discount of 40 per cent, on Confederate notes, he 
was sure that the South would yield in the end. This made 
me think very deeply. There w^as no reason, if we could 
keep the Copperheads subdued, why we should not hold our 
own on our own territory. Secondly^ as the war went on we 
should soon win converts. Tliirdlij^ that the North had im- 
mense resources — its hay crop alone Avas worth more than all 
the cotton crop of the South. And fourthly^ that when 
manufacturing and contract-making for the army should once 
begin, there would be such a spreading or wasting of money 
and making fortunes as the w^orld never witnessed, and that 
while we grew rich, the South, without commerce or manu- 
factures, must grow poor. 

I felt as if inspired, and I wrote an article entitled, " Woe 
to the South." At this time, " Woe to the North " was the 
fear in every heart. I showed clearly that if we would only 
keep up our hearts, that the utter ruin of the South was in- 
evitable, while that for us there was close at hand such a 
period of prosperity as no one ever dreamt of — that every 
factory would soon double its buildings, and prices rise be- 
yond all precedent. I followed this article by others, all in 
a wild, enthusiastic style of triumph. People thought I was 
mad, and the New York Times compared my utterances to the 
outpourings of a fanatical Puritan in the time of Cromwell. 



242 MEMOIRS. 

But they were fulfilled to the letter. There is no in- 
stance that I know of in which any man ever prophesied so 
directly in the face of public opinion and had his predictions 
so accurately fulfilled. I was all alone in my opinions. At 
all times a feeling as of awe at myself comes over me when I 
think of what I published. For, with the exception of Gil- 
more, who had a kind of vague idea that he kept a prophet 
— as Moses the tailor kept a poet — not a soul of my acquaint- 
ance believed in all this. 

Then I went a step further. I found that the real block in 
the way of Northern union was the disgust which had gathered 
round the mere name of Abolitionist. It became very appar- 
ent that freeing the slaves would, as General Birney once said 
to me, be knocking out the bottom of the basket. And people 
wanted to abolitionise without being "Abolitionists " ; and at 
this time even the Neiv York Trihune became afraid to advo- 
cate anti-slavery,and the greatest fanatics were dumb with fear. 

Then I made a new departure. I advocated emancipa- 
tion of the slaves as a luar measure only^ and my cry was 
" Emancipation for the sake of the "White Man." I urged 
prompt and vigorous action without any regard to philan- 
thropy. As publishing such views in the Knickerhocker was 
like pouring the wildest of new wine into the weakest of old 
bottles, Gilmore resolved to establish at once in Boston a 
political monthly magazine to be called the Continental^ to 
be devoted to this view of the situation. It was the only 
political magazine devoted to the Eepublican cause published 
during the war. That it fully succeeded in rapidly attract- 
ing to the Union party a vast number of those who had held 
aloof owing to their antipathy to the mere word abolition, is 
positively true, and still remembered by many.* Very speed- 

* Abraham Lincoln once remarked of the people who wanted eman- 
cipation, but who did not like to be called Abolitionists, that they re- 
minded him of the Irishman who had signed a temperance pledge and 
did not like to break it, yet who sadly wanted a " drink." So going to 
an apothecary he asked for a glass of soda-water, adding, "an', docther 



THE RETURN TO AMERICA. 243 

ily indeed people at large caught at the idea. I remember 
the very first time when one evening I heard Governor 
Andrews say of a certain politician that he was not an 
Abolitionist but an Emancipationist; and it was subsequently 
declared by my friends in Boston, and that often, that the 
very bold course taken by the Continental Magazine^ and the 
creation by it of the Emancipationist wing, had hastened by 
several months the emancipation of the slaves by Abraham 
Lincoln. It was for this alone that the University of Cam- 
bridge, Massachusetts, afterwards, through its president, gave 
me the degree of A. M., " for literary services rendered to 
the country during the war," which is as complete a proof of 
what I assert as could be imagined, for this was in very truth 
the one sole literary service which I performed at that time, 
and there were many of my great literary friends who de- 
clared their belief in, and sympathy with, the services which 
I rendered to the cause. But I will now cite some facts 
which fully and further confirm what I have said. 

The Continental Magazine was, as I may say, a something 
more than semi-official organ. Mr. Seward contributed to it 
two anonymous articles, or rather their substance, which were 
written out and forwarded to me by Oakey Hall, Esq., of 
New York. We received from the Cabinet at Washington 
continual suggestions, for it was well understood that the 
Continental was read by all influential Republicans. A con- 
tributor had sent us a very important article indeed, pointing 
out that there was all through the South, from the Mississip- 
pi to the sea, a line of mountainous country in which there 
were few or no slaves, and very little attachment to the Con- 
federacy. This article, which was extensively republished, 
attracted great attention. It gave great strength and en- 
dear, if yees could put a little whisky into it unheknownst to me, I'd be 
much obliged to yees." I believe that I may say that as Mr. Lincoln 
read all which I published (as I was well assured), I was the apothecary 
here referred to, who administered the whisky of Abolition disguised 
in the soda-water of Emancipation. 



2-t4: MEMOIRS. 

couragement to the grand plan of the campaign, afterwards 
realised by Sherman. Bjj official request, to me directed, the 
author contributed a second article on the subject. These 
articles were extensively circulated in pamphlet form or 
widely copied by the press, and created a great sensation, 
forming, in fact, one of the great points made in influencing 
public opinion. Another of the same kind, but not ours, 
was the famous pamphlet by Charles Stille, of Philadelphia, 
" How a Free People Conduct a Long War," in which it was 
demonstrated that the man who can hold out longest in a 
fight has the best chance, which simple truth made, however, 
an incredible popular impression. Gil more and our friends 
succeeded, in fact, in making the Continental Magazine 
" respected at court." But I kept my independence and 
principles, and thundered away so fiercely for immediate 
emancipation that I was confidentially informed that Mr. 
Seward once exclaimed in a rage, " Damn Leland and his 
magazine ! " But as he damned me only officially and in 
confidence, I took it in the Pickwickian sense. And at this 
time I realised that, though I was not personally very much 
before the public, I was doing great and good work, and, as 
I have said, a great many very distinguished persons ex- 
pressed to me by letter or in conversation their appreciation 
of it ; and some on the other side wrote letters giving it to 
me per contra, and one of these was Caleb Cushing. Cu- 
shing in Chinese means " ancient glory," but Caleb's renown 
was extinguished in those days. 

I may add that not only did H. W. Longfellow express to 
me his sympathy for and admiration of my efforts to aid the 
Union cause, but at one time or another all of my literary 
friends in Boston, who perfectly understood and showed deep 
interest in what I was doing. Which can be well believed of 
a city in which, above all others in the world, everybody 
sincerely aims at culture and knowledge, the first principle 
of which — inspired by praiseworthy local patriotism — is to 
know and take pride in what is done in Boston by its natives. 



V. 

LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR AND 

ITS SEQ UENCE. 

1862-1866. 

Boston in 1862 — Kind friends — Lirerary circles — Emerson, 0. W. 
Holmes, Lowell, E. P. Whipple, Agassiz, &c. — The Saturday dinners 
— The printed autograph— The days of the Dark Shadow — Lowell 
and Hosea Biglow — I am assured that the Continental Ilagazine 
advanced the period of Emancipation — I return to Philadelphia — 
My pamphlet on *' Centralisation versus States Rights " — Its Results 
— Books — Ping-Wing — The Emergency — I enter an artillery com- 
pany — Adventures and comrades — R. W. Gilder — I see rebel 
scouts near Harrisburg — The shelling of Carlisle — Incidents — My 
brother receives his death-wound at my side — Theodore Fassitt — 
Stewart Patterson — Exposure and hunger — The famous bringing- 
up of the cannon — Picturesque scenery — The battle of Gettysburg 
— The retreat of Lee — Incidents — Return home — Cape May — The 
beautiful Miss Vining — Solomon the Sadducee — General Carrol 
Tevis — The Sanitary Fair — The oil mania — The oil country — Colo- 
nel H. Olcott, the theosophist — Adventures and odd incidents in 
Oil-land — Nashville — Dangers of the road — A friend in need — I act 
as unofBcial secretary and legal adviser to General Whipple — Freed 
slaves — Inter arma silent leges — Horace Harrison — Voodoo — Cap- 
tain Joseph R. Paxton — Scouting for oil and shooting a brigand — 
Indiana in winter — Charleston, West Virginia — Back and forth 
from Providence to the debated land — The murder of A. Lincoln — 
Goshorn — Up Elk River in a dug-out — A charmed life— Sam Fox 
— A close shot — Meteorological sorcery — A wild country — Marvel- 
lous scenery — I bore a well — Robert Hunt — Horse adventures — The 
panther — I am suspected of being a rebel spy — The German apology 
— Cincinnati — Niagara — A summer at Lenox, Mass. — A MS. burnt. 

We went to Boston early in December, 1861, and during 
that winter lived pleasantly at the Winthrop House on the 



246 MEMOIRS. 

Common. I had already many friends, and took letters to 
others who became our friends. We were very kindly re- 
ceived. Among those whom we knew best were Mrs. and 
Mr. H. Ritchie, Mrs. and Mr. T. Perkins, Mrs. 11. G. Otis, 
Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Ward — but I 
must really stop, for there was no end to the list. Among 
my literary friends or acquaintances, or " people whom I 
have very often met," were Emerson, Longfellow, Dr. 0. W. 
Holmes, J. E. Lowell, E. P. Whipj^le, Palfrey, G. Ticknor, 
Agassiz, E. Everett — in a word, all that brilliant circle which 
shone when Boston was at its brightest in 1862. I was often 
invited to the celebrated Saturday dinners, where I more 
than once sat by Emerson and Holmes. As I had been 
editor of the free lance Vanity Fair^ and was now conduct- 
ing the Continental with no small degree of audacity, regard- 
less of friend or foe, it was expected — and no wonder — that 
I would be beautifully cheeky and New Yorky ; and truly 
my education and antecedents in America, beginning with 
my training under Barnum, v/ere not such as to inspire faith 
in my modesty. But in the society of the Saturday Club, 
and in the very general respect manifested in all circles in 
Boston for culture or knowledge in every form — in which 
respect it is certainly equalled by no city on earth — I often 
forgot newspapers and politics and war, and lived again in 
memory at Heidelberg and Munich, recalling literature and 
art. I heard, a day or two after my first Saturday, that I 
had passed the grand ordeal successfully, or summa cum 
magna laude^ and that Dr. Holmes, in enumerating divers 
good qualities, had remarked that I was modest. Every 
stranger coming to Boston has a verdict or judgment passed 
on him — he is numbered and labelled at once — and it is 
really wonderful how in a few days the whole town knows it. 
I had met with Emerson many years before in Philadel- 
l)hia, where I had attracted his attention by remarking in 
Mrs. James Rush's drawing-room that a vase in a room was 
like a bridge in a landscape, which he recalled twenty years 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 247 

later. Witli Dr. Holmes I had corresponded. Lowell ! " that 
reminds me of a little story." 

There was some "genius of freedom" — i. e., one who takes 
liberties — who collected autographs, and had not even the 
politeness to send a written request. He forwarded to me 
this printed circular : 

" Dear Sir : As I am collecting the autographs of dis- 
tinguished Americans, I would be much obliged to you for 
your signature. Yours truly, ." 

While I was editing Vcmity Fair I received one of these 
circulars. I at once wrote : — 

" Dear Sir : It gives me great pleasure to comply with 
your request. Charles G. Lelakd." 

I called the foreman, and said, " Mr. Chapin, please to set 
this up and pull half-a-dozen proofs." It was done, and I 
sent one to the autograph-chaser. He was angry, and an- 
swered impertinently. Others I sent to Holmes and Lowell. 
The latter thought that the applicant was a great fool not to 
understand that such a printed document was far more of a 
curiosity than a mere signature. I met with Chapin after- 
wards, when in the war. He had with him a small company 
of printers, all of whom had set up my copy many a time. 
Printers are always polite men. They all called on me, and 
having no cards, left cigars, which were quite as acceptable 
at that time of tobacco-famine. 

Amid all the horrors and anxieties of that dreadful year, 
while my old school-mate. General George B. McClellan, was 
delaying and demanding more men — 7nas y mas y mas — I 
still had as many happy hours as had ever come into any year 
of my life. If I made no money, and had to wear my old 
gloves (I had fortunately a good stock gathered from one of 
Frank Leslie's debtors), and had to sail rather close to the 
wind, I still found the sailing very pleasant, and the wind 
fair and cool, though I was pauper m aire. 

Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis held a ladies' sewing-circle to 
make garments for the soldiers, at vv^hich my wife worked zeal- 



. 248 MEMOIRS. 

oiTsly. There were many social receptions, readings, etc., where 
we met everybody. It was very properly considered bad form 
in those early days of the war to dance or give grand dinners 
or great " parties." It was, in fact, hardly decent for a man 
to dress up and appear as a swell at all anywhere. Death was 
beginning to strike fast into families through siege and battle, 
and crape to blacken the door-bells. There was a dark shad- 
ow over every life. I had been assured by an officer that my 
magazine was doing the work of two regiments, yet I was tor- 
mented with the feeling that I ought to be in the war, as my 
grandfather would surely have been at my age. The officer 
alluded to wrote to me that he on one occasion had read one 
of my articles by camp-fire to his regiment, who gave at the 
end three tremendous cheers, which were replied to by the 
enemy, who were not far away, with shouts of defiance. As 
for minor incidents of the war-time, I could fill a book with 
them. One day a young gentleman, a joerfect stranger, came 
to my office, as many did, and asked for advice. He said, 
" Where I live in the country we have raised a regiment, and 
they want me to be colonel, but I have no knowledge what- 
ever of military matters. What shall I do?" I looked at 
him, and saw that he " had it in him," and replied, " New 
York is full of Hungarian and German military adventurers 
seeking employment. Get one, and let him teach you and 
the men ; but take good care that he does not supplant 3^ou. 
Let that be understood." After some months he returned in 
full uniform to thank me. He had got his man, had fought 
in the field — all had gone well. 

I remember, as an incident worth noting, that one even- 
ing while visiting Jas. R. Lowell at his house in Cambridge, 
awaiting supper, there came a great bundle of proofs. They 
were the second series of the Biglow Papers adapted to the 
new struggle, and as I was considered in Boston at that time 
as being in my degree a literary political authority or one of 
some general experience, he was anxious to have my opinion 
of them, and had invited me for that purpose. He read them 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 249 

to me, manifested great interest as to my opinion, and seemed 
to be very much delighted or relieved when I praised them 
and predicted a success. I do not exaggerate in this in the 
least ; his expression was plainly and unmistakably that of a 
man from whom some doubt had been banished. 

My brother Henry had at once entered a training-school 
for officers in Philadelphia, distinguished himself as a pupil, 
and gone out to the war in 1862. The terrible ill-luck which 
attended his every effort in life overtook him speedily, and, 
owing to his extreme zeal and over-work, he had a sunstroke, 
which obliged him to return home. He was a first-lieuten- 
ant. The next year he went as sergeant, and was again in- 
valided. What further befell him will appear in the coarse 
of my narrative. 

The Continental Magazine had done its work and was 
evidently dying. I had never received a cent from it, and it 
had just met the expenses of publication. It had done much 
good and rendered great service to the Union cause. Gil- 
more had very foolishly yielded half the ownership to Robert 
J. Walker, of whom I confess I have no very agreeable recol- 
lections. So it began to die. But I have the best authority 
for declaring that, ere it died, it had advanced the time of the 
Declaration of Emancipation, which was the turning-point of 
the whole struggle, and all my friends in Boston were of that 
opinion. This I can fully prove. 

The summer of 1862 I passed in Dedham, going every 
day to my office in Boston. We lived at the Phoenix Hotel, 
and occupied the same rooms which my father and mother 
had inhabited thirty-five years before. We had many very 
kind and hospitable friends. I often found time to roam 
about the country, to sit by Wigwam Lake, to fish in the 
river Charles, and explore the wild woods. I have innumer- 
able pleasant recollections of that summer. 

I returned in the autumn with my wife to Philadelphia, 
and to my father's house in Locust Street. The first thing 
which I did was to write a pamphlet on " Centralisation 



250 



MEMOIRS. 



versus States Rights." In it I set forth clearly enough the 
doctrine that the Constitution of the United States could not 
be interpreted so as to sanction secession, and that as the 
extremities or limbs grew in power, so there should be a 
strengthening of the brain or greater power bestowed on the 
central Government. I also advocated the idea of a far greater 
protection of general and common industries and interests 
being adopted by the Government. 

There was in the Senate a truly great man, of German 
extraction, named Gottlieb Orth, from Indiana. He was 
absolutely the founder of the Bureaus of Education, &c., 
which are now flourishing in Washington. He wrote to me 
saying that he had got the idea of Industrial bureaus from 
my pamphlet. In this pamphlet I had opposed the com- ^ 
monly expressed opinion that we must do nothing to " aggra- 
vate the South." That is, we should burn the powder up by 
degrees, as the old lady did who was blown to pieces by the 
experiment. " Do not drive them to extremes." I declared 
that the South would go to extremes in any case, and that we 
had better anticipate it. This brought forth strange fruit in 
after years, long after the war. 

While I was in Boston in 1862, I published by Putnam in 
New York a book entitled " Sunshine in Thought," which 
had, however, been written long before. It was all directed 
against the namby-pamby pessimism, " lost Edens and buried 
Lenores," and similar weak rubbish, which had then begun 
to manifest itself in literature, and which I foresaw was in 
future to become a great curse, as it has indeed done. Only 
five hundred copies of it were printed. 

I was very busy during the first six months of 1863. I 
wrote a work entitled " The Art of Conversation, or Hints 
for Self-Education," which was at once accepted and pub- 
lished by Carleton, of New York. It had, I am assured, a 
very large sale indeed. I also wrote and illustrated, with the 
aid of my brothei;, a very eccentric pamphlet, " The Book of 
Copperheads." When Abraham Lincoln died two books 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 251 

were found in his desk. One was the " Letters of Petroleum 
V. Nasby," by Dr. K. Locke, and my " Book of Copper- 
heads," which latter was sent to me to see and return. It 
was much thumbed, showing that it had been thoroughly 
read by Father Abraham. 

I also translated Heine's " Book of Songs." Most of these 
had already been published in the " Pictures of Travel." I 
restored them to their original metres. I also translated the 
" Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing " from the German, and 
finished up, partially illustrated, and published two juvenile 
works. One of these was " Mother Pitcher," a collection of 
original nursery rhymes for children, which I had writen 
many years before expressly for my youngest sister, Emily, 
now Mrs. John Harrison of Philadelphia. In this work 
occurs my original poem of " Ping-Wing the Pieman's Son." 
Of this Poem Puncli said, many years after, that it was " the 
best thing of the kind which had ever crossed the Atlantic." 
Ping- Wing appeared in 1891 as a full-page cartoon by Tenniel 
in Punchy and as burning up the Treaty. I may venture to 
say that Ping- Wing — once improvised to amuse dear little 
Emily — has become almost as well known in American nurs- 
eries as " Little Boy Blue," at any rate his is a popular type, 
and when Mrs. Yanderbilt gave her famous masked ball in 
New York, there was in the Children's Quadrille a little Ping- 
Wing. Ping travelled far and wide, for in after years I put 
him into Pidgin-English, and gave him a place in the "Piflgin- 
English Ballads," which have always been read in Canton, I 
daresay by many a heathen Chinese learning that childlike 
tongue. I also translated the German " Mother Goose." 

And now terrible times came on, followed, for me, by 
a sad event. The rebels, led by General Lee, had pene- 
trated into Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia was threatened. 
This period was called the " Emergency." I could easily have 
got a command as officer. I had already obtained for my 
brother an appointment as major with secretary's duty on 
Fremont's staff, which he promptly declined. But it was no 



252 MEMOIRS. 

time to stand on dignity, and I was rather proud, as was my 
brother, to go as " full private " in an artillery company known 
as " Chapman Biddle's," though he did not take command of 
it on this occasion.* Our captain was a dealer in cutlery 
named Landis. 

After some days' delay we were marched forth. Even 
during those few days, while going about town in my private's 
uniform, I realised in a droll new way what it was to be a 
commo7i man. Maid-servants greeted me like a friend, other 
soldiers and the humbler class talked familiarly to me. I 
had, however, no excuse to think myself any better than my 
comrades, for among the hundred were nearly twenty lawyers 
or law-students, and all were gentlemen as regards position in 
society. Among them was K. W. Gilder, now the editor of 
the Century^ who was quite a youth then, and in whose 
appearance there was something which deeply interested me. 
I certainly have a strange Gypsy faculty for divining charac- 
ter, and I divined a genius in him. He was very brave and 
uncomplaining in suffering, but also very sensitive and emo- 
tional. Once it happened, at a time when we were all nearly 
starved to death and worn out with want of sleep and fa- 
tigue, that I by some chance got a loaf of bread and some 
molasses. I cut it into twelve slices and sweetened them, 
intending to give one to every man of our gun. But I could 
only find eleven, and, remembering Gilder, went about a long 
mile to find him ; and when I gave it to him he was so 
touched that the tears came into his fine dark eyes. Trivial 
as the incident was, it moved me. Another was Theodore 
Fassitt, a next-door neighbour of mine, whose mother had 
specially commended him to me, and who told me that once 



* Chapman Biddle himself was a very remarkable man as a lawyer, 
and a person of marked refinement and culture. He became my friend 
in after years, as did his son Walter. Both are now departed. I wrote 
and publicly read an " In Memoriam " address and poem on his death, 
in delivering which I had great pains to refrain from weeping, which was 
startling to me, not being habitually expressive of emotion. 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 253 

or twice he had stolen ears of maize from the horses to keep 
himself alive. Also Edward Penington, and James Biddle, a 
gentleman of sixty; but I really cannot give the roll-call. 
However, they all showed themselves to be gallant gentlemen 
and true ere they returned home. The first night we slept 
in a railroad station, packed like sardines, and I lay directly 
across a rail. Then we were in camp near Harrisburg for a 
week — dans la pluie et la misere. 

AYe knew that the rebels were within six miles of us, at 
Shooter's Hill — in fact, two of our guns went there. Pening- 
ton was with them, and had a small skirmish, wherein two of 
the foemen were slain, the corporal being, however, called off 
before he could secure their scalps. That afternoon, as I was 
on guard, I saw far down below a few men who appeared to 
be scouting very cautiously, and hiding as they did so. They 
seemed mere specks, but I was sure they were rebels. I 
called on Lieutenant Perkins, who had a glass, but neither 
he nor others present thought they were of the enemy. Long 
after, this incident had a droll sequel. 

Hearing that the rebels were threatening Carlisle, we 
were sent thither on a forced march of sixteen miles. They 
had been before us, and partially burned the barracks. We 
rested in the town. There was a large open space, for all the 
world like a stage. Ladies and others brought us refresh- 
ments; the scene became theatrical indeed. The soldiers, 
wearied with a long march, were resting or gossipping, when 
all at once — ivliizz-hang — a shell came flying over our heads 
and burst. There were cries — the ladies fled like frightened 
wild-fowl ! The operatic effect was complete ! 

About ten thousand rebel regulars, hearing that we had 

occupied Carlisle, had returned, and if they had known that 

there were only two or three thousand raw recruits, they 

might have cai3tured us all. From this fate we were saved 

by a good strong tremendous lie, well and bravely told. 

There was a somewhat ungainly, innocent, rustic-looking 

youth in our company, from whose eyes simple truth peeped 
12 



254 MEMOIRS. 

out like two country girls at two Sunday-school windows. 
He, having been sent to the barracks to get some fodder, 
with strict injunction to return immediately, of course lay 
down at once in the hay and had a good long nap. The 
rebels came and roused him out, but promised to let him go 
free on condition that he would tell the sacred truth as to 
how many of us Federal troops were in Carlisle. And he, 
moved by sympathy for his kind captors, and swearing by 
the Great Copperhead Serpent, begged them to fly for their 
lives ; " for twenty regiments of regulars, and Heaven only 
knew how many volunteers, had come in that afteruoon, and 
the whole North was rising, and trains running, and fresh 
levies pouring in." 

The rebels believed him, but they would not depart with- 
out giving us a touch of their quality, and so fired shell and 
grape in on us till two in the morning. There were two 
regiments of " common fellows," or valiant city roughs, with 
us, who all hid themselves in terror wherever they could. 
But our company, though unable to fire more than a few 
shots, were kept under fire, and, being all gentlemen, not a 
man flinched. 

I did not, to tell the truth, like our captain ; but what- 
ever his faults were, and he had some, cowardice was not 
among them. Some men are reckless of danger ; he seemed 
to be absolutely insensible to it, as I more than once observed, 
to my great admiration. He was but a few feet from me, 
giving orders to a private, when a shell burst immediately 
over or almost between them. Neither was hurt, but the 
young man naturally shied, when Landis gruffly cried, " Never 
mind the shells, sir ; they'll not hurt you till they hit you." 

I was leaning against a lamp-post when a charge of grape 
went through the lamp. Eemembering the story in " Peter 
Simple," and that " lightning never strikes twice in the same 
place," I remained quiet, when there came at once another, 
smashing what was left of the glass about two feet above my 
head. 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 255 

Long after the war, when I was one day walking with 
Theodore Fassitt, I told him the tale of how I had awakened 
the family at the fire in Munich. And Theodore dolefully 
exclaimed, " I don't see why it is that / can never do any- 
thing heroic or fine like that ! " Then I said, " Theodore, 
I will tell you a story. Once upon a time there was a boy 
only eighteen years of age, and it happened in the war that 
he was in a town, and the rebels shelled it. Now this boy 
had charge of four horses, and the general had told him to 
stay in one place, before a church ; and he obeyed. The 
shells came thick and fast — I saw it all myself — and by-and- 
bye one came and took off a leg from one of the horses. 
Then he was in a bad way with his horses, but he stayed. 
After a while the general came along, and asked him ' why 
the devil he was stopping there.' And he replied, ' I was 
ordered to, sir ! ' Then the general told him to get behind 
the church at once." 

" Why 1 " cried Theodore in amazement, " / loas that 
hoy ! " 

" Yes," I replied ; " and the famous Roman sentinel who 
remained at his post in Pompeii was no braver, and I don't 
think he had so hard a time of it as you had with that horse." 

I was put on guard. The others departed or lay down to 
sleep on the ground. The fire slackened, and only now and 
then a shell came with its diabolical scream like a dragon 
into the town. All at last was quiet, when there came sham- 
bling to me an odd figure. There had been some slight at- 
tempt by him to look like a soldier — he had a feather in his 
hat — but he carried his rifle as if after deer or raccoons, and 
as if he were used to it. 

" Say, Cap ! " he exclaimed, " kin you tell me where a 
chap could get some ammynition?" 

"Go to your quartermaster," I replied. 

" Ain't got no quartermaster." 

" Well, then to your commanding officer — to your regi- 
ment." 



256 MEMOIRS. 

" Ain't got no commanding officer nowher' this side o' 
God, nor no regiment." 

" Then who the devil are you, and where do you belong ? " 

" Don't belong nowher'. I'll jest tell you. Cap, how it is. 
I live in the south line of New York State, and when I heard 
that the rebs had got inter Pennsylvany, forty of us held a 
meetin' and 'pinted me Cap'n. So we came down here cross 
country, and 'rived this a'ternoon, and findin' fightin' goin' 
on, went straight for the bush. And gettin' cover, we shot 
the darndest sight of rebels you ever did see. And now all 
our ammynition is expended, I've come to town for more, for 
ther's some of 'em still left— who want killin' badly." 

" See here, my friend," I replied. " You don't know it, 
but you're nothing but a bush-whacker, and anybody has a 
right to hang or shoot you out of hand. Do you see that 
great square tent ? " Here I pointed to the general's mar- 
quee. " Go in there and report yourseU and get enrolled." 
And the last I saw of him he was stumbling over the sticks 
in the right direction. This was my first experience of a 
real guerillo — a character with whom I was destined to make 
further experience in after days. 

An earlier incident was to me extremely curious. There 
was in our battery a young gentleman named Stewart Pat- 
terson, noted for his agreeable, refined manners. He was 
the gunner of our cannon No. Two. We had brass Napo- 
leons. At the distance of about one mile the rebels were 
shelling us. Patterson brought Ids gun to bear on theirs, 
and the two exchanged shots at the same instant. Out of 
the smoke surrounding Patterson's gun I saw a sword-blade 
fly perhaps thirty feet, and then himself borne by two or 
three men, blood flowing profusely. The four fingers of his 
right hand had been cut away clean by a piece of shell. 

At the instant I saw the blade flash in its flight, I recalled 
seeing precisely the same thing long before in Heidelberg. 
There was a famous duellist who had fought sixty or seventy 
times and never received a scratch. One day he was acting 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 257 

as second^ when the blade of his principal, becoming broken 
at the hilt by a violent blow, flew across the room, rebounded, 
and cut the second's lip entirely open. It was remarkable 
that I should twice in my life have seen such a thing, in both 
instances accompanied by wounds. Long after I met Pat- 
terson in Philadelphia, I think, in 1883. He did not recog- 
nise me, and gave me his left hand. I said, " Not that hand, 
Patterson, but the other. You've no reason to be ashamed 
of it. I saw the fingers shot off." 

But on that night there occurred an event v»^hich, in the 
end, after years of suffering, caused the deepest sorrow of my 
life. As we were not firing, I and the rest of the men of the 
gun were lying on the ground to escape the shells, but my 
brother, who was nothing if not soldierly and punctilious, 
stood upright in his place just beside me. There came a 
shell which burst immediately, and very closely over our 
heads, and a piece of it struck my brother exactly on the 
brass buckle in his belt on the spine. The blow was so 
severe that the buckle was bent in two. It cut through his 
coat and shirt, and inflicted a slight wound two inches in 
length. But the blow on the spine had produced a concus- 
sion or disorganisation of the brain, which proved, after years 
of suffering, the cause of his death. At first he was quite 
senseless, but as he came to, and I asked him anxiously if he 
was hurt, he replied sternly, " Go back immediately to your 
place by the gun ! " He was like grandfather Leland. 

A day or two after, while we were on a forced march to 
intercept a party of rebels, the effect of the wound on my 
brother's brain manifested itself in a terrible hallucination. 
He had become very gloomy and reserved. Taking me aside, 
he informed me that as he had a few days before entered a 
country-house, contrary to an order issued, to buy food, he 
was sure that Captain Landis meant as soon as possible to 
have him shot, but that he intended, the instant he saw any 
sign of this, at once to attack and kill the captain ! Know- 
ing his absolute determined and inflexibly truthful char- 



258 MEMOIRS. 

acter, and seeing a fearful expression in his eyes, I was much 
alarmed. Keflecting in the first i)lace that he was half- 
starved, I got him a meal. I had brought from Philadelphia 
two pounds of dried beef, and this, carefully hoarded, had 
eked out many a piece of bread for a meal. I begged some 
bread, gave my brother some beef with it, and 1 think suc- 
ceeded in getting him some colfee. Then I went to Lieu- 
tenant Perkins — a very good man — and begged leave to take 
my brother's guard and to let him sleep. He consented, and 
my brother gradually came to his mind, or at least to a bet- 
ter one. But he was never the same person afterwards, his 
brain having been permanently affected, and he died in con- 
sequence five years after. 

I may note as characteristic of my brother, that, twelve 
3^ears after his death, Walt Whitman, who always gravely 
spoke the exact truth, told me that there was one year of his 
life durins" which he had received no encouras^ement as a 
poet, and so much ridicule that he was in utter despondency. 
At that time he received from Henry, who was unknown to 
him, a cheering letter, full of admiration, which had a great 
effect on him, and inspired him to renewed effort. He sent 
my brother a copy of the first edition of his "Leaves of 
Grass," with his autograph, which I still possess. I knew 
nothing of this till Whitman told me of it. The poet de- 
clared to me very explicitly that he had been much influ- 
enced by my brother's letter, which was like a single star in 
a dark night of despair, and I have indeed no doubt that the 
world owes more to it than will ever be made known. 

During the same week in which this occurred my wife's 
only brother, Rodney Fisher, a young man, and captain in 
the regular cavalry, met with a remarkably heroic death at 
Aldie, Virginia. He was leading what was described as " the 
most magnificent and dashing charge of the whole cam- 
paign," when he was struck by a bullet. He was carried to 
a house, where he died within a week. He was of the stock 
of the Delaware Rodneys, and of the English Admiral's, or 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 259 

of the best blood of the Revolation, and well worthy of it. 
It was all in a great cause, but these deaths entered into the 
soul of the survivors, and we grieve for them to this day. 

Oar sufferings as soldiers during this Emergency were 
very great. I heard an officer who had been through the 
whole war, and through the worst of it in Virginia, declare 
that he had never suffered as he did with us this summer. 
And our unfortunate artillery company endured far more 
than the rest, for while pains were taken by commanding 
officers of other regiments, especially the regulars, to obtain 
food, our captain, either because they had the advance on 
him, or because he considered starving us as a part of the 
military drama, took little pains to feed us, and indeed neg- 
lected his men very much. As we had no doctor, and many 
of our company suffered from cholera morbus, I, having some 
knowledge of medicine, succeeded in obtaining some red 
pepper, a bottle of Jamaica ginger, and whisky, and so re- 
lieved a great many patients. One morning our captain 
forbade my attending to the invalids any more. " Proper 
medical attendance," he said, " would be provided." It was 
not ; only now and then on rare occasions was a surgeon bor- 
rowed for a day. What earthly difference it could make in 
discipline (where there was no show or trace of it) whether I 
looked after the invalids or not was not perceptible. But 
our commander, though brave, was unfortunately one of 
those men who are also gifted with a great deal of " pure 
cussedness," and think that the exhibiting it is a sign of 
bravery. Although we had no tents, only a miserably rotten 
old gun-cover, and not always that, to sleep under (I gener- 
ally slept in the open air, frequently in the rain), and often 
no issue of food for days, we were strictly prohibited from 
foraging or entering the country houses to buy food. .This, 
which was a great absurdity, was about the only point of 
military discipline strictly enforced. 

At one time during the war, when men were not allowed 
to sleep in the country houses (to protect their owners), the 



260 MEMOIRS. 

soldiers would very often burn these houses down, in order 
that, when the family had fled, they might use the fireplace 
and chimney for cooking; and so our men, forbidden to 
enter the country houses to buy or beg food, stole it. 

I can recall one very remarkable incident. We had six 
guns, heavy old brass Napoleons. One afternoon we had to 
go uphill — in many cases it was terribly steep — by a road 
like those in Devonshire, resembling a ditch. It rained in 
torrents and the water was knee-deep. The poor mules had 
to be urged and aided in every way, and half the pulling and 
pushing was done by us. All of us worked like navvies. So 
we went onwards and upwards for sixteen miles ! When we 
got to the top of the hill, out of one hundred privates, Henry, 
I, and four others alone remained. E. W. Gilder was one of 
these, besides Landis and Lieutenant Perkins — that is to say, 
we alone had not given out from fatigue ; but the rest soon 
followed. This exploit was long after cited as one of the 
most extraordinary of the war — and so it was. We were 
greatly complimented on it. Old veterans marvelled at it. 
But what was worse, I had to lie all night on sharp flints — 
i. e., the slag or debris of an iron smeltery or old forge out of 
doors — in a terrible rain, and, though tired to death, got very 
little sleep ; nor had we any food whatever even then or the 
next day. Commissariat there was none, and very little at 
any time. 

From all that I learned from many intimate friends who 
were in the war, I believe that we in the battery suffered to 
the utmost all that men can suffer in the field, short of 
wounds and death. Yet it is a strange thing, that had I not 
received at this time most harassing and distressing news 
from home, and been in constant fear as regards my brother, 
I should have enjoyed all this Emergency like a picnic. We 
often marched and camped in the valley of the Cumberland 
and in Maryland, in deep valleys, by roaring torrents or " on 
the mountains high," in scenery untrodden by any artist or 
tourist, of marvellous grandeur and beauty. One day we 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 261 

came upon a scene which, may be best described by the fact 
that my brother and I both stopped, and both cried out at 
once, " Switzerland ! " The beauty of Nature was to me a 
constant source of delight. Another was the realisation of 
the sense of duty and the pleasure of war for a noble cause. 
It was once declared by a reviewer that in my Breitmann 
poems the true gaudium certamiiiis, or enjoyment of battle, 
is more sincerely expressed than by any modern poet, because 
there is no deliberate or conscious effort to depict it seriously. 
And I believe that I deserved this opinion, because the order 
to march, the tramp and rattle and ring of cavalry and artil- 
lery, and the roar of cannon, always exhilarated me ; and 
sometimes the old days of France would recur to me. One 
day, at some place where we were awaiting an attack and I 
was on guard. General Smith, pausing, asked me something 
of which all I could distinguish was " Fire — before." Think- 
ing he had said, "Were you ever under fire before? "and. 
much surprised at this interest in my biography, I replied, 
'■'■ Yes, General — in Paris — at the barricades in Forty-eight." 
He looked utterly amazed, and inquired, " What the devil did 
you think I said ? " I explained, when he laughed heartily, 
and told me that his question was, " Has there been any 
firing here before ? " 

Two very picturesque scenes occur to me. One was a 
night before the battle of Gettysburg. The country was 
mountain and valley, and the two opposing armies were 
camped pretty generally in sight of one another. There was, 
I suppose, nearly half a cord of wood burning for every twelve 
men, and these camp-fires studded the vast landscape like 
countless reflections of the stars above, or rather as if all were 
stars, high or low. It was one of the most wonderful sights 
conceivable, and I said at the time that it was as well worth 
seeing as Vesuvius in eruption. 

Henry had studied for eighteen months in the British Art 
School in Rome, and passed weeks in sketching the Alham- 
bra, and, till he received his wound, took great joy in the pic- 



262 MEMOIRS. 

turesque scenery and " points " of military life. But it is in- 
credible how little we ate or got to eat, and how hard we 
worked. It is awful to be set to digging ditches in a soil 
nine-tenths sto7ie^ when starving. 

As we were raw recruits, we were not put under fire at 
Gettysburg, but kept in Smith's reserve. But on the night 
after the defeat, when Lee retreated in such mad and need- 
less haste across the Potomac, we were camped perhaps the 
nearest of any troops to the improvised bridge, I think within 
a mile. That night I was on guard, and all night long I heard 
the sound of cavalry, the ring and rattle of arms, and all that 
indicates an army iu headlong flight. I say that they went 
in needless haste. I may be quite in the wrong, but I have 
always believed that Meade acted on the prudent policy of 
making a bridge of gold for a retreating enemy; and I always 
believed, too, that at heart he did not at all desire to inflict 
extreme suffering on the foe. Had he been a General Bir- 
ney, he would have smote them then and there hip and thigh, 
and so ended the war " for good and all," like a Cromwell, 
with such a slaughter as was never seen. I base all this on 
one fact. At two o'clock on the afternoon before that night 
I went to a farmhouse to borrow an axe wherewith to cut 
some fuel ; and I was told that the rebels had carried away 
every axe in great haste from every house, in order to make a 
bridge. Now, if I knew that at two o'clock. General Meade, 
if he had any scouts at all, must have known it. But — qid 
vult decijyi-, decipiatur. 

That ended the Emergency. The next day, I think, we 
received the welcome news that we were no longer needed and 
would soon be sent home. On the way we encamped for a 
week at some place, I forget where. There was no drill now 
— we seldom had any — no special care of us, and no " polic- 
ing " or keeping clean. Symptoms of typhoid fever soon 
appeared ; forty of our hundred were more or less ill. My 
brother and I knew very well that the only way to avert this 
was to exercise vigorously. On waking in the morning we all 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 263 

experienced languor and lassitude. Those who yielded to it 
fell ill. Henry was always so ready to work, that once our 
sergeant, Mr. Bullard, interposed and gave the duty to an- 
other, saying it was not fair. I always remembered it with 
gratitude. But this feverish languor passed away at once with 
a little chopping of wood, bringing water, or cooking. 

One more reminiscence. Our lieutenant, Perkins, was a 
pious man, and on Sunday mornings held religious service, 
which we were obliged to attend. One day, when we had by 
good fortune rations of fresh meat, it was cooked for dinner 
and put by in two large kettles. During the service two hun- 
gry pigs came, and in our full sight overturned the kettles, 
and, after rooting over the food, escaped v/ith large pieces. 
I did not care to dine, like St. Antonio, on pigs' leavings. 
My brother finding me, asked why I looked so glum. I re- 
plied that I was hungry. " Is that all?" he replied. " Come 
with me ! " We went some distance until we came to a farm- 
house in the forest. He entered, and, to my amazement, was 
greeted as an old friend. He had been there in the campaign 
of the previous year. I was at once supplied with a meal. 
My brother was asked to send them newspapers after his re- 
turn. He never sought for mysteries and despised dramatic 
effects, but his life was full of them. Once, when in IsTaples, 
he was accustomed to meet by chance every day, in some re- 
tired walk, a young lady. They spoke, and met and met 
again, till they became like friends. One day he saw her in 
a court procession, and learned for the first time that she was 
a younger daughter of the King. But he never met her 
again. 

There were two or three boys of good family, none above 
sixteen, who had sworn themselves in as of age — recruiting 
officers were not particular — and who soon developed brilliant 
talents for " foraging," looting, guerilla warfare, horse-steal- 
ing, pot-hunting rebels, and all those little accomplishments 
which appear so naturally and pleasingly in youth when in 
the field. For bringing out the art of taking care of your- 



264 MEMOIRS. 

self, a camp in time of war is superior even to " sleeping about 
in the markets," as recommended by Mr. Weller. Other tal- 
ents may be limited, but the amount of " devil " which can 
be developed out of a " smart " boy as a soldier is absolutely 
infinite. College is a Sunday-school to it. One of these youths 
had " obtained " a horse somewhere, which he contrived to 
carry along. Many of our infantry regiments gradually con- 
verted themselves into cavalry by this process of " obtaining " 
steeds ; and as the officers found that their men could walk 
better on horses' legs, they permitted it. This promising 
youngster was one day seated on a caisson or ammunition wag- 
gon full of shells, &c., when it blew up. By a miracle he rose 
in the air, fell on the ground unhurt, and marching immedi- 
ately up to the lieutenant and touching his hat, exclaimed, 
" Please, sir, caisson No. Two is blown to hell ; please appoint 
me to another ! " That oath was not recorded. Poor boy ! 
he died in the war. 

There was one man in our corps, a good-natured, agree- 
able person, a professional politician, who astonished me by 
the fact that however starved we might be, he had always a 
flask of whisky wherewith to treat his friends ! Where or 
how he always got it I never could divine. But in Amer- 
ica every politician always has whisky or small change where- 
with to treat. Always. Money was generally of little use, 
for there was rarely anything to buy anywhere. I soon de- 
veloped here and there an Indian-like instinct in many 
things, and this is indeed deep in my nature. I cannot ex- 
plain it, but it is there. I became expert when we approached 
a house at divining, by the look of waggons or pails or hen- 
coops, whether there was meal or bread or a mill anywhere 
near. One day I informed our lieutenant that a detachment 
of rebel cavalry had recently passed. He asked me how I 
knew it. I replied that rebel horses, being from mountain- 
ous Virginia, had higher cocks and narrower to their shoes, 
and one or two more nails than ours, which is perfectly true. 
And where did I learn that? Not from anybody. I had 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 265 

noticed the difference as soon as I saw the tracks, and guessed 
the cause. One day, in after years in England, I noticed 
that in coursing, or with beagles, the track of a gypsy was 
exactly like mine, or that of all Americans — that is. Indian- 
like and straight-forivard. I never found a Saxon-English- 
man who had this step, nor one who noticed such a thing, 
which I or an Indian would observe at once. Once, in Kome, 
Mr. Story showed me a cast of a foot, and asked me what it 
was. I replied promptly, " Either an Indian girl's or an 
American young lady's, whose ancestors have been two hun- 
dred years in the country." It was the latter. Such feet 
lift or leap, as if raised every time to go over entangled 
grass or sticks. Like an Indian, I instinctively observe 
everybody's eai^s^ which are unerring indices of character. I 
can sustain, and always could endure, incredible fasts, but for 
this I need coffee in the morning. " Mark Twain " — whom 
I saw yesterday at his villa, as I correct this proof — also has 
this peculiar Indian-like or American faculty of observing 
innumerable little things which no European would ever 
think of. There is, I think, a great deal of " hard old In- 
jun " in him. The most beautiful of his works are the three 
which are invariably bound in silk or muslin. They are 
called " The Three Daughters, or the Misses Clemens." 

It occurred to me, after I had recorded the events of our 
short but truly vigorous and eventful campaign, to write to 
E. W. Gilder and ask him — quid memoricB datum est — " what 
memories he had of that great war, wherein we starved and 
swore, and all but died." There are men in whose letters we 
are as sure to find genial life as a spaccio di vhio or wine- 
shop in a Florentine street, and this poet-editor is one of 
them. And he replied with an epistle not at all intended 
for type, which I hereby print without his permission, and 
in defiance of all the custom or courtesy which inspires 
gentlemen of the press. 



266 MEMOIRS. 

" May StJi, 1S93. 
" Editokial Department, The Century Magazine, 

" Union Square, New York. 

" My dear Leland : How your letter carries me back ! Do you 
know that one night when I was trudging along in the dark over a 
road-bed where had been scattered some loose stones to form a founda- 
tion, I heard you and another comrade talking me over in the way to 
which you refer in your letter ? Well, it was either you or the other 
comrade who said you had given me something to eat, and I know that 
I must have seemed very fragile, and at times woe-begone. I was pos- 
sibly the youngest in the crowd. I was nineteen, and really enjoyed it 
immensely notwithstanding. 

'• I remember you in those days as a splendid expressor of our mis- 
eries. You had a magnificent vocabulary, wherewith you could elo- 
quently and precisely describe our general condition of starvation, mud, 
ill-equippedness, and over-work. As I think of those days, I hear 
reverberating over the mountain-roads the call, ' Cannoneers to the 
wheels ! ' and in imagination I plunge knee-deep into the mire and grab 
the spokes of the caisson.* 

" Do you remember the night we spent at the forge ? I burnt my 
knees at the fire out-doors, while in my ears was pouring a deluge from 
the clouds. I finally gave it up, and spent the rest of the night crouch- 
ing upon the fire-bed of the forge itself, most uncomfortably. 

'• You will remember that we helped dig the trenches at the fort on 
the southern side of the river from Harrisburg,f and that one section 



* In reference to " heaving out " by main force, cannon from some 
deep slough, perhaps of stiff clay, which holds like glue, or, what I think 
far more wearisome, urging them along for miles over the heaviest roads 
or broken ways, when the poor exhausted mules have almost given out. 
Though, as he says, he was only nineteen and seemed very fragile, the 
indomitable pluck and perseverance of Gilder in all such trials were such 
as to call special commendation from my brother Henry, who was not 
habitually wasteful of praise. 

f " Well do I remember " also what accursed work it was, the ground 
consisting chiefly of broken stone, and how a number of Paddies, who 
were accustomed to such labour, assembled above and around us to en- 
joy the unusual sight of " jontlemen " digging like " canawlers," and how 
I, while at my spade, excited their hilarity and delight by casting at 
them scraps of " ould Eerish," or Irish. The fight of the section liere 
alluded to was, I believe, rather of the nature of an improvised rencontre, 
albeit two or three rebels were killed in the artillery duel. Corporal 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 267 

of the battery got into a fight near that fort ; nor can you have forgot- 
ten when Stuart Patterson's hand was shot oif at Carlisle. As he passed 
me, I heard him say, ' My God, I'm shot ! ' That night, after we were 
told to retire out of range of the cannon, while we were lying under 
a tree near one of the guns, an officer called for volunteers to take 
the piece out of range. I stood up with three others, but seeing and 
hearing a shell approach, I cried out, * Wait a moment ! ' — which 
checked them. Just then the shell exploded within a yard of the 
cannon. If we had not paused, some of us would surely have been 
hit. We then rushed out, seized the cannon, and brought it out of 
range. 

" By the way. General William F. Smith (Baldy Smith) has since 
told me that he asked permission to throw the militia (including our- 
selves) across one of Lee's lines of retreat. If he had been permitted to 
do so, I suppose you and I would not have been in correspondence 
now. 

" You remember undoubtedly the flag of truce that came up into 
the town before the bombardment began. The man was on horseback 
and had the conventional white flag. The story was that Baldy Smith 
sent word ' that if they wanted the town they could come and take 
it.' * I suppose you realise that we were really a part of Meade's 

Penington was, I believe, as usual, the inspiring Mephistopheles of 
the affair. 

* This reply, which is much better in every respect than that of " The 
old guard dies but never yields," was made in the face of far more over- 
whelming numbers, and has few parallels for sheer audacity, all things 
considered, in the history of modern warfare. It passed into a very 
widely-spread popular mot in America. It is more than an on dit, for 
I was nearly within ear-shot when it was uttered, and it was promptly 
repeated to me. Yet, if my memory serves me right, there is some- 
thing like this, " Come and take it ! " recorded in the early Tuscan wars 
in Villari's introduction to the " Life of Machiavelli," translated by his 
accomplished wife. I have, as I write this note, just had the pleasure 
of meeting with the Minister and Madame Villari at a dinner at Sena- 
tor Comparetti's in Florence, which is perhaps the reason why I recall 
the precedent. And I may also recall as a noteworthy incident, that at 
this dinner Professor Milani, the great Etruscologist and head of the 
ArchaBological Museum, congratulated me very much on having been 
the first and only person who ever discovered an old Etruscan word 
still living in the traditions of the people — i. e., Intial, the Spirit of the 
Haunting Shadow. This is a little discursive — 7nais je prends mon bien 



268 MEMOIRS. 

right, and that we helped somewhat to delay the rebel left wing. Do 
you not remember hearing from our position at Carlisle the guns of 
that great battle — the turning-point of the war?* 

" 1 could run on in this way, but your own memory must be full of 
the subject. I wish that we could sometime have a reunion of the old 
battery in Philadelphia. I have a most distinct and pleasant remem- 
brance of your brother — a charming personality indeed, a handsome 
refined face and dignified bearing. I remember being so starved as to 
eat crackers that had fallen on the ground ; and I devoured, too, wheat 
from the fields rubbed in the hands to free it from the ear. . . . 

" Sincerely, R. W. Gilder. 

" P. S. — I could write more, but you will not need it from me." 

Truly, I was that other comrade whom Gilder overheard 
commending him, and it was I who gave him something to 
eat, I being the one in camp who looked specially after two 
or three of the youngest to see that they did not starve, and 
who doctored the invalids. 

I here note, with all due diffidence, that Mr. Gilder chiefly 
remembers me as " a splendid expressor of our miseries, with 
a magnificent vocabulary" wherewith to set forth fearful 
adversities. I have never been habitually loquacious in life ; 
full many deem me deeply reticent and owl-like in my taci- 
turnity, but I " can hoot Avhen the moon shines," nor is there 

ouj'e le troiive, and it is all autobiographic ! " It is all turkey," as the 
wolf said when he ate the claws. 

The proposal of General Smith to resist with us alone the tre- 
mendous maddened rush of half of Lee's veterans has its re-echo in my 
ballad, where Breitmann attempts with his Bummers to stem the great 
army of the South. The result would have probably been the same — 
that is, we should have been " gobbled up." But he would have un- 
doubtedly tried it without misgiving. I have elsewhere narrated my 
only interview with him. 

* The thunder of the artillery at Gettysburg was indeed something 
to be long and well remembered. It was so awful that on the field wild 
rabbits, appalled by the sound, ran to the gunners and soldiers and tried 
to take refuge in their bosoms. Those who have only heard cannon 
fired singly, or a single discharge of cannon, can have no conception of 
what such sounds when long sustained are like. 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 269 

altogether lacking in me in great emergencies a certain rude 
kind of popular eloquence, which has — I avow it with humil- 
ity — enabled me invariably to hold my own in verbal encoun- 
ters with tinkers, gypsies, and the like, among whom " chaff " 
is developed to a degree of which few respectable people have 
any conception, and which attains to a refinement of sarcasm, 
origi7iaUty^ and humour in the London of the lower orders, 
for which there is no parallel in Paris, or in any other Eu- 
ropean capital ; so that even among my earliest experiences 
I can remember, after an altercation with an omnibus-driver, 
he applied to me the popular remark that he was " blessed if 
he didn't believe that the gemman had been takin' lessons in 
language hof a cab-driver, and set up o' nights to Zea7'?i." 
But the ingenious American is not one whit behind the vig- 
orous Londoner in " de elegant fluency of sass," as darkies 
term it, and it moves my heart to think that, after thirty 
years, and after the marvellous experiences of men who are 
masters of our English tongue which the editor of the Century 
must have had, he still retains remembrance of my oratory ! 

At last we were marched and railroaded back to Philadel- 
phia. I need not say that we were welcome, or that I en- 
joyed baths, clean clothes, and the blest sensation of feeling 
decent once more. Everything in life seemed to be luxurious 
as it had never been before. Luxuries are very conventional. 
A copy of Praetorius, for which I paid only fifteen shillings, 
was to me lately a luxury for weeks ; so is a visit to a picture 
gallery. For years after, I had but to think of the Emer- 
gency to realise that I was actually in all the chief conditions 
of happiness. 

Feeling that, although I was in superb health and strength, 
the seeds of typhoid were in me, I left town as soon as pos- 
sible, and went with my wife, her sister, and two half-nieces, 
or nieces by marriage, and child-nephew, Edward Robins, to 
Cape May, a famous bathing- place by the ocean. One of the 
little girls here alluded to, a Lizzie Eobins, then six years of 
age, is now well known as Elizabeth Robins Pennell, and " a 



270 MEMOIRS. 

writer of books," while Edward lias risen in journalism in 
Pbiladelpliia. There as I walked often eighteen or twenty 
miles a day by the sea, when the thermometer was from 90° 
to 100° in the shade, I soon worked away all apprehension of 
typhoid and develoj^ed muscle. One day I overheard a man 
in the next bathing-house asking who I was. " I don't 
know," replied the other, " but if I were he, I'd go in for 
being a prize-fighter." 

Everybody was poor in those days, so we went to a very 
cheap though respectable hotel, where we paid less than half 
of what we had always given at " The Island," and where we 
were in company quite as happy or comfortable as we ever 
had been anywhere, though the death of her brother weighed 
sadly on my poor wife, and her dear good mother, whom I 
always loved tenderly, and with whom I never had a shade of 
difference of opinion nor a whisper of even argument, and to 
whom I was always devoted. I seem to have been destined 
to differ from other mortals in a few things : one was, that I 
always loved my mother-in-law with whole heart and soul, 
and never considered our menage as perfect unless she were 
with ns. She was of very good and rather near English 
descent, a Callender, and had been celebrated in her 3^outh 
for extraordinary beauty. Her husband was related to the 
celebrated beauty Miss Vining, whom Maria Antoinette, from 
the fame of her loveliness, invited to come and join her court. 
At the beginning of this century no great foreigner travelled 
in America without calling on Miss Vining in Delaware. 
There is a life of her in Griswold's " Eepublican Court." It 
is without any illustrative portrait. I asked Dr. Griswold 
why he had none. He replied that none existed. I said to 
him severely, " Let this be a lesson to you never to publish 
anything without submitting it first to me. I have a photo- 
graph of her miniature." The Doctor submitted ! 

This summer at Cape May I made the acquaintance of a 
very remarkable man named Solomon. He was a Jew, and 
we became intimate. One evening he said to me : " You 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 271 

know so much about the Jews that I have even learned some- 
thing from you about them. But I can teach you something. 
Can you tell the difference between the Aschkenazim and 
the SejjJiardim by their eyes ? No ! Well, now, look ! " Just 
then a Spanish-looking beauty from New Orleans passed by. 
" There is Miss Inez Aguado ; observe that the corners of 
her eyes are long with a peculiar turn. Wait a minute ; now, 
there is Miss Lowenthal — Levi, of course — of Frankfort. 
Don't you see the difference ? " 

I did, and asked him to which of the classes he belonged. 
He replied — 

" To neither. I am of the sect of the ancient Sadducees, 
Vtdio took no part in the Crucifixion." 

Then I replied, "You are of the Karaim." 

" 'No ; that is still another sect or division, though very 
ancient indeed. We never held to the Halacha, and we laugh 
at the Mishna and Talmud and all that. We do not believe 
or disbelieve in a God — Yahveh, or the older Elohim. We 
hold that every man born knows enough to do what is right ; 
and that is religion enough. After death, if he has acted 
up to this, he will be all right should there be a future of 
immortality ; and if he hasn't, he will be none the worse 
off for it. We are a very small sect. We call ourselves 
the JVei6 Rcformirte. We have a place of worship in New 
York." 

This was the first agnostic whom I had ever met. I 
thought of the woman in Jerusalem who ran about with the 
torch to burn up heaven and the water to extinguish hell- 
fire. Yes, the sect was very old. The Sadducees never 
denied anything ; they only inquired as to truth. Seek or 
Sihh ! 

I confess that Mr. Solomon somewhat weakened the effect 
of his grand free-thought philosophy by telling me in full 
faith of a Rabbi in New York who was so learned in the 
Cabala that by virtue of the sacred names he could recover 
stolen goods. Whether, like Browning's sage, he also received 



272 MEMOIRS. 

them, I did not learn. But c'est tout comme cliez nous autres. 
The same spirit which induces a man to break out of or- 
thodox humdrumness, induces him to love the marvellous, 
the forbidden, the odd, the wild, the droll — even as I do. It 
is not a fair saying that " atheists are all superstitious, which 
proves that a man must believe in something." No; it is the 
spirit of nature, of inquiry, of a desire for the new and to 
penetrate the unknown ; and under such influence a man 
may truly be an atheist as regards what he cannot prove or 
reconcile with universal love and mercy, and yet a full be- 
liever that magic and ghosts may possibly exist among the 
infinite marvels and mysteries of nature. It is admitted that 
a man may believe in God without being superstitious; it is 
much truer that he may be " superstitious " (whatever that 
means) without believing that there is an anthro]Domorphic 
bo7i Dieu. However this may be, Mr. Solomon made me re- 
flect often and deeply for many a long year, until I arrived 
to the age of Darwin. 

I also made at Cape May the acquaintance of a very re- 
markable man, whom I was destined to often meet in other 
lands in after years. This was Carrol (not as yet General) 
Tevis. We first met thus. The ladies wanted seats out on 
the lawn, and there was not a chair to be had. He and I 
were seeking in the hotel-office ; all the clerks were absent, 
and all the chairs removed ; but there remained a solid iron 
sofa or settee, six feet long, weighing about 600 pounds. 
Tevis was strong, and a great fencer ; there is a famous botte 
which he invented, bearing his name; perhaps Walter H. 
Pollock knows it. I gave the free-lance or condottiero a 
glance, and proposed to prig the iron sofa and lay waste the 
enemy. It was a deed after his Dugald Dalgetty heart, and 
we carried it off and seated the ladies. 

In the autumn there was a vast Sanitary Fair for the 
benefit of the army hospitals held in Philadelphia. I edited 
for it a daily newspaper called Our Daily Fare, which often 
kept me at work for eighteen hours per diem, and in doing 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 273 

which I was subjected to much needless annoyance and 
mortification. At this Fair I saw Abraham Lincoln. 

It was about this time that the remarkable oil fever, or 
mania for speculating in oil-lands, broke out in the United 
States. Many persons had grown rich during the war, and 
were ready to speculate. Its extent among all classes was 
incredible. Perhaps the only parallel to it in history was the 
Mississippi Bubble or the South Sea speculations, and these 
did not collectively employ so much capital or call out so 
much money as this petroleum mania. It had many strange 
social developments, which I was destined to see in minute 
detail. 

My first experience was not very pleasant. A publisher 
in New York asked me to write him a humorous poem on 
the oil mania. It was to be large enough to make a small 
volume. I did so, and in my opinion wrote a good one. It 
cost me much time and trouble. When it was done, the 
publisher refused to tctke it^ saying that it was not what he 
wanted. So I lost my labour or oleum per dicli. 

I had two young friends named Colton, who had been in 
the war from the beginning to the end, and experienced its 
changes to the utmost. Neither was over twenty-one. Wil- 
liam Colton, the elder, Avas a captain in the regular cavalry, 
and the younger, Baldwin, was his orderly. It was a man in 
the Captain's company, named Yost, who furnished the type 
of Hans Breitmann as a soldier. The brothers told me that 
one day in a march in Tennessee, not far from Murfrees- 
boro', they had found petroleum in the road, and thought it 
indicated the presence of oil-springs. I mentioned this to Mr. 
Joseph Lea, a merchant of Philadelphia. He was the father 
of Mrs. Anna Lea Merritt, who has since become a very dis- 
tinguished artist, well known in England, being the first 
lady painter from whom the British Government ever bought 
a picture. Mr. Lea thought it might be worth some expense 
to investigate this Tennessee oil. I volunteered to go, if my 
expenses were paid, and it was agreed to. It is difiicult at 



274 MEMOIRS. 

the present day to give any reader a clear idea of the dangers 
and trouble which this undertaking involved, and I was fully 
aware beforehand what they would be. The place was on 
the border, in the most disorganised state of society conceiv- 
able, and, in fact, completely swarming with guerillas or 
brigands, sa7is merci, who simply killed and stripped every- 
body who fell into their hands. All over our border or 
frontier there are innumerable families who have kept up 
feuds to the death, or vendettas^ in some cases for more than 
a century ; and now, in the absence of all civil law, these 
were engaged in wreaking their old grudges without restraint, 
and assuredly not sparing any stranger who came between 
them. 

I had a friend in C. A. Dana, the Assistant- Secretary of 
War, and another in Colonel Henry Olcott, since known as 
the theosophist. The latter had just come from the country 
which I proposed to visit. I asked him to aid me in getting 
military passes and introductions to officers in command. 
He promised to do so, saying that he would not go through 
what I had before me for all the oil in America.* And, in- 
deed, one could not take up a newspaper without finding full 
proof that Tennessee was at that time an inferno or No-man's 
Land of disorder. 

I went to it with my eyes wide open. After so many 
years of work, I was as poor as ever, and the seven years of 
harvest which I had prophesied had come, and I was not 
gathering a single golden grain. My father regarded me as 



* Apropos of Olcott he did good and noble work in the war, in the 
field, and also out of it as a Government detective, and I am very far 
from being ashamed to say that I aided him more than once in the 
latter capacity. There was a lady in Philadelphia who availed herself 
of a distinguished position in society so as to go and come from Rich- 
mond and act as spy and carry letters between rebel agents. I knew 
this and told Olcott of it, who put a stop to her treason. I also 
learned that a rascally contractor had defrauded Government with 
adulterated chemicals. Olcott had him heavily fined. 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 275 

a failure in life, or as a literary ne'er-do-weel, destined never 
to achieve fortune . or gain an etat^ and he was quite right. 
My war experience had made me reckless of life, and specu- 
lation was firing every heart. I bought myself a pair of 
long, strong, overall boots and blanket, borrowed a revolver, 
arranged money affairs with Mr. Lea, who always acted with 
the greatest generosity, intelligence, and kindness, packed 
my carpet-bag, and departed. It was midwinter, and I was 
destined for a wintry region, or Venango County, where, un- 
til within the past few months, there had been many more 
bears and deer than human beings. For it was in Venango, 
Pennsylvania, that the oil-wells were situated, and Mr. Lea 
judged it advisable that I should first visit them and learn 
something of the method of working, the geology of the re- 
gion, and other practical matters. 

My brother accompanied me to the station, and I left at 
about 8 P. M. After a long, long, weary night and day, I 
arrived at an oil town, whose name I now forget. By great 
good fortune I secured a room, and by still greater luck I 
got acquainted the next morning at breakfast with three or 
four genial and gentlemanly men, all " speculators " like my- 
self, who had come to spy into the plumpness and oiliness of 
the land. We hired a sleigh and went forth on an excursion 
among the oil-wells. It was in some respects the most re- 
markable day I ever spent anywhere. 

For here was oil, oil, oil everywhere, in fountains flowing 
at the rate of a dollar a second (it brought 70 cents a gallon), 
derricks or scaffoldings at every turn over wells, men making 
fortunes in an hour, and beggars riding on blooded horses. 
I myself saw a man in a blue carter's blouse, carrying a 
black snake- whip, and since breakfast, for selling a friend's 
farm, he had received $250,000 as commission (i. e., £50,000). 
When we stopped to dine at a tavern, there stood behind us 
during all the meal many country-fellows, all trying to sell 
oil-lands ; every one had a great bargain at from thirty or 
forty thousand dollars downwards. The lowest in the lot was 



276 MEMOIRS. 

a boy of seventeen or eighteen, a loutish-looking youth, who 
looked as if his vocation had been peddling apples and loz- 
enges. He had only a small estate to dispose of for $15,000 
(£3,000), but he was very small fry indeed. My companions 
met with many friends ; all had within a few days or hours 
made or lost incredible sums by gambling in oil-lands, bor- 
rowing recklessly, and failing as recklessly. Companies were 
formed here on the spot as easily as men get up a game of 
cards, and of this within a few days I witnessed many in- 
stances. Two men would meet. "Got any land over?" 
{L e., not " stocked "). " Yes, first-rate ; geologer's certifi- 
cate ; can you put it on the market ? " " That's my business. 
I've floated forty oil stocks already, terms half profits." So 
it would be floated forthwith. Gambling by millions was in 
the air everywhere ; low common men held sometimes thirty 
companies^ all their own, in one pocket, to be presently 
sprung in New York or elsewhere. And in contrast to it 
was the utterly bleak wretchedness and poverty of every 
house, and the miserable shanties, and all around and afar 
the dismal, dark, pine forests covered with snow. 

I heard that day of a man who got a living by spiritually 
intuiting oil. " Something told him," some Socratic demon 
or inner impulse, that there was " ile " here or there, deep 
under the earth. To pilot to this " ile " of beauty he was 
paid high fees. One of my new friends avowed his intention 
of at once employing this oil-seer as over-seer. 

We came to some stupendous tanks and to a well which, 
as one of my friends said enviously and longingly, was run- 
ning three thousand dollars a day in clear greenbacks. Its 
history was remarkable. For a very long time an engineer 
had been here, employed by a company in boring, but bore 
he never so wisely, he could get nothing. At last the com- 
pany, tired of the expenditure and no returns, wrote to him 
ordering him to cease all further work on the next Saturday. 
But the engineer had become " possessed " with the idea that 
he must succeed, and so, unheeding orders, he bored away 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 277 

all alone the next day. About sunset some one going by 
heard a loud screaming and hurrahing. Hastening up, he 
found the engineer almost delirious with joy, dancing like a 
lunatic round a fountain of oil, which was "as thick as a 
flour-barrel, and rising to the height of a hundred feet." It 
was speedily plugged and made available. All of this oc- 
curred only a very few days before I saw it. 

That night I stopped at a newly-erected tavern, and, as no 
bed was to be had, made up my mind to sleep in my blanket 
on the muddy floor, surrounded by a crowd of noisy specula- 
tors, waggoners, and the like. I tell this tale vilely, for 
I omitted to say that I did the same thing the first night 
when I entered the oil-country, got a bed on the second, and 
that this was the third. But even here I made the acquaint- 
ance of a nice Scotchman, who found out another very nice 
man who had a house near by, and who, albeit not accus- 
tomed to receive guests, said he would give us two one bed, 
which he did. However, the covering was not abundant, and 
I, for all my blanket, was a-cold. In the morning I found a 
full supply of blankets hanging over the foot-board, but we 
had retired without a light, and had not noticed them. Our 
breakfast being rather poor, our host, with an apology, 
brought in a great cold mince-pie three inches thick, which 
is just the thing which I love best of all earthly food. That 
he apologised for it indicated a very high degree of culture 
indeed in rural America, and, in fact, I found that he was a 
well-read and modest man. 

It was, I think, at a place called Plummer that I made 

the acquaintance of two brothers named B , who seemed 

to vibrate on the summit of fortune as two golden balls might 

on the top of the oil-fountain to which I referred. One 

spoke casually of having at that instant a charter for a bank 

in one pocket, and one for a railroad in the other. They 

bought and sold any and all kinds of oil-land in any quantity, 

without giving it a thought. While I was in their office, 

one man exhibited a very handsome revolver. " How much 
13 



278 MEMOIRS. 

did it cost?" asked B. " Fifty dollars" (£10). "I wish," 
replied B., " that when you go to Philadelphia you'd get me 
a dozen of them for presents." A man came to the window 
and called for him. " What do you want ? " " Here are 
the two horses I spoke about yesterday." Hardly heeding 
him, and talking to others, B. went to the window, cast 
a casual glance at the steeds, and said, " What was it you 
said that you wanted for them ? " " Three thousand dol- 
lars." " All right ! go and put 'em in the stable, and come 
here and get the money." 

From Plummer I had to go ten miles to Oil City. If I 
had only known it, one of my very new friends, who was 
very kind indeed to a stranger, would have driven me over in 
his sleigh. But I did not know it, and so paid a very rough 
countryman ten dollars (£2) to take me over on a jiunjjer. 
This is the roughest form of a sledge, consisting of two sap- 
lings with the ends turned up, fastened by cross-pieces. The 
snow on the road was two feet deep, and the thermometer at 
zero. But the driver had two good horses, and made good 
time. I found it very difficult indeed to hold on to the 
vehicle and also to keep my carpet-bag. Meanwhile my 
driver entertained me with an account of a great misfor- 
tune which had just befallen him. It was as follows : — 

" Before this here oil-fever came along I had a little 
farm that cost me $150, and off that, an' workin' at car- 
pentrin', I got a mighty slim livin'. I used to keep all my 
main savin's to pay taxes, and often had to save up the 
cents to get a prospective drink of whisky. Well, last 
week I sold my farm for forty thousand dollars, and dern 
my skin ef the feller that bought it didn't go and sell it 
yesterday for a hundred and fifty thousand ! Just like my 
derned bad luck ! " 

" See here, my friend," I said ; " I have travelled pretty 
far in my time, but I never saw a country in which a man 
with forty thousand dollars was not considered rich." 

" He may be rich anywhere else with it," replied the 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 279 

nouveau riclie contemptuously, "but it wouldn't do more 
than buy him a glass of whisky here in Plummer." 

Having learned what I could of oil-boring, I went to Cin- 
cinnati, and then to Nashville by rail. It may give the read- 
er some idea of what kind of a country and life I was com- 
ing into when I tell him that the train which preceded mine 
had been stopped by the guerillas, who took from it fifty 
Federal soldiers and shot them dead, stripping the other pas- 
sengers ; and that the one which came after had a hundred 
and fifty bullets fired into it, but had not been stopped. 
We passed by Mammoth Cave, but at full speed, for it 
was held by the brigands. All of which things were duly 
chronicled in the Northern newspapers, and read by all at 
home. 

I got to Nashville. It had very recently been taken by 
the Federal forces under General Thomas, who had put it 
under charge of General Whipple, who was, in fact, the rul- 
ing or administrative man of the Southwest just then. I 
went to the hotel. Everything was dismal and dirty — noth- 
ing but soldiers and officers, with all the marks of the field 
and of warfare visible on them — citizens invisible — every- 
thing proclaiming a city camp in time of war — sixty thousand 
men in a city of twenty thousand, more or less. I got a 
room. It was so cold that night that the ice froze two inches 
thick in my pitcher in my room. 

I expected to find the brothers Colton in Nashville. I 
went to the proper military authority, and was informed that 
their regiment was down at the front in Alabama, as was also 
the officer who had the authority to give them leave of ab- 
sence. I was also informed that my only chance was to go to 
Alabama, or, in fact, into the field itself, as a civilian ! This 
was a dreary prospect. However, I made up my mind to it, 
and was walking along the street in a very sombre state of 
mind, for I was going to a country like that described in 
" Sir Grey Stele "— 

" Whiche is called the Land of Doubte." 



280 MEMOIRS. 

And doubtful indeed, and very dismal and cold and old, 
did everything seem on that winter afternoon as I, utterly 
alone, went my way. What I wanted most of all things on 
earth was a companion. With my brother I would have 
gone down to the front and to face all chances as if it were 
to a picnic. 

When ill-fortune intends to make a spring, she draws 
back. But good fortune, God bless her ! does just the same. 
Therefore si fortuna tonat^ caveto mergi — if fortune frowns, 
do not for that despond. Just as I was passing a very re- 
spectable-looking mansion, I saw a sign over its office-door 
bearing the words : " Captain Joseph R. Paxton, Mustering- 
in and Disbursing Officer." 

Joseph R. Paxton was a very intimate friend of mine in 
Philadelphia. He was still a young man, and one of the 
most remarkable whom I have ever known. He was a great 
scholar. He was more familiar with all the rariora^ curiosa^ 
and singular marvels of literature than any body I ever knew 
except Octave Delepierre, with whose works he first made 
me acquainted. He had translated Ik Marvel's " Reveries 
of a Bachelor " into French, and had been accepted by a 
Paris publisher. He had been a lawyer, an agent for a rail- 
road, and had long edited in Philadelphia a curious journal 
entitled Bizarre, and written a work on gems. His whole 
soul, however, was in the French literature of the eighteenth 
century, and he always had a library which would make a 
collector's mouth water. Had he lived in London or Paris, 
he would have made a great reputation. And he was kind- 
hearted, genial, and generous to a fault. He had always 
some unfortunate friend living on him, some Bohemian of 
literature under a cloud. 

I 'entered the office and found him, and great was his 
amazement ! " Que diable, mon ami, faiatu ici dans cette 
galere ? " was his greeting. I explained the circumstances in 
detail. He at once exclaimed, " Come and live here with 
me. General AYhipple is my brother-in-law, and he will be 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 281 

here in a few days and live with us. He'll make it all right." 
" Here, Jim ! " he cried to a great six-foot man of colour — 
" run round to the hotel and bring this gentleman's lug- 
gage ! " 

There I remained for a very eventful month. Paxton 
had entered with the conquerors, and had just seized on the 
house. I may indeed say that we seized on it, as regards any 
right — I being accepted as hail-fellow-well-met, and as a bird 
of the same feather. In it was a piano and a very good old- 
fashioned library. It was like Paxton to loot a library. He 
had had his pick of the best houses, and took this one, 
"niggers included," for the servants, by some odd freak, 
preferred freedom with Paxton to slavery with their late 
owner. This gentleman was a Methodist clergyman, and 
Paxton found among his papers proofs that he had been con- 
cerned in a plot to burn Cincinnati by means of a gang of 
secret incendiaries. 

AVhenever the blacks realised the fact that a Northern 
man was a gentleman — they all have marvellous instincts for 
this, and a respect for one beyond belief — they took to him 
with a love like that of bees for a barrel of syrup. I have 
experienced this so often, and in many cases so touchingly, 
that I cannot refrain from recording it. Among others who 
thus took to me was the giant Jim, who was unto Paxton 
and me as the captive of our bow and spear, albeit an eman- 
cipated contraband. When the Southerners defied General 
Butler to touch their slaves, because they were their " prop- 
erty " by law, the General replied by " confiscating " the 
property by what Germans call Faustrecht (or fist-right) as 
" contraband of war." 

This Jim, the general waiter and butler, was a character, 
shrewd, clever, and full of dry humour. When I was alone 
in the drawing-room of an evening, he would pile up a great 
wood-fire, and, as I sat in an arm-chair, would sit or recline 
on the floor by the blaze and tell me stories of his slave life, 
such as this : — 



282 MEMOIRS. 

" My ole missus she always say to me, * Jim, don' you 
ever have anything to do with dem Yankees. Dey're all 
pore miserable wile wretches. Dey lib in poverty an' nasti- 
ness and don' know nothin'.' I says to her, ' It's mighty 
quare, missus. I can't understan' it. Whar do all dem 
books come from? Master gits em from de Norf. Who 
makes all our boots an' clothes and sends us tea an' every- 
thin' ? Dey can't all be so pore an' ignoran' ef dey writes 
our books an' makes everythin' we git.' ' Jim,' she says, 
* you're a fool, an' don' understan' nothin'.' ' Wery good, 
missus,' says I, but I thinked it over. All we do is to raise 
cotton, an' dey make it into cloff, which we hav'n't de sense 
to do." 

I believe that I give this word for word. And Jim, as I 
found, was a leading mind among the blacks. 

I had a letter of introduction from Mr. Lea to Horace 
Harrison, who was the State Attorney for Tennessee. At 
this time his power was very great, for he had in his hands 
the disposition of all the estates of all the rebels in Tennes- 
see. He was the type of a Southwestern gentleman. He 
reminded me very much of my old Princeton friends, and 
when I was in his office smoking a pipe, I felt as if I were in 
college again. I liked him very much. One morning I 
called, and after some deliberation he said, " You are a 
lawyer, are you not?" I replied that I had studied law 
under Judge Cadwallader. 

" Then I should like to consult with you as a lawyer. I 
have a very difficult case to deal with. There is a law de- 
claring that all property belonging to rebels shall be seized 
and held for one year. Now, here is a man whose estate I 
have held for six months, who has come in and declared his 
allegiance, and asks for his lands. And I believe that before 
long, nnless he comes in now, they will be almost ruined. 
What shall I do ? " 

" It appears to me," I replied, " that if the disposal of 
these lands is in your hands, you must be supposed to exert 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 283 

some will and discretion. Stat pro ratione voluntas is a good 
axiom here. We are not at all in statu quo ante lellum — in 
fact, the war is not at an end, nor decided. Your duty is to 
act for the good of the country, and not simply to skin the 
enemy like a bushwhacker, but to pacify the people. Victor 
volentes per populos dat jura — laws should always be mildly 
interpreted. In your case, considering the very critical con- 
dition of the country, I should in equity give the man his 
property, and take his oath of allegiance. Severe measures 
are not advisable — quod est violentum^ noii est duraMle." 

This is, I believe, pretty accurately what I said. That 
evening, as I was sitting with General Whipple, he amazed 
me by addressing me exactly as Mr. Harrison had done in 
the morning. 

" I say, Leland, you're a lawyer, and I want your advice. 
There are six warehouses here, and I want them badly for 
military stores. But Horace Harrison says that I can't have 
them, because he holds them for the United States. What 
am I to do?" 

" General Whipple," I replied, " is this town under mili- 
tary occupation in time of war, or is it not?" 

" Most decidedly it is." 

" So I should think from the way your patrols bother me. 
And if such is the case, all things must yield to military 
wants. Where we have no legal principles or courts to de- 
cide, we must fall back on legal axioms. And here the law 
is clear and explicit, for it says. Liter arma leges silent — the 
laws are suspended in warfare." 

" A magnificent saying ! " exclaimed the General admir- 
ingly. " Ah ! you ought to be in the Supreme Court." And 
seizing a pen he wrote to the State Attorney : — 

" Sir : This town, being but recently captured from the 
enemies of the United States, is, of course, under military 
occupation, which renders absolutely necessary for military 
purpose many temporary seizures and uses, such as that of 
the six warehouses referred to in our late correspondence. 



284 MEMOIRS. 

As regards legal precedent and principle, I need not remind 
one of your learning that — (I say, Leland, how do you spell 
that Latin ?—I-7i-t-e-r—yes, I've got it)— Liter arma silent 

legesy 

I am afraid that Horace Harrison, when he got that let- 
ter, suspected that I had been acting as counsel for both 
sides. However, as I took no fee, my conscience was at rest. 
I think that I was of great use to General Whipple at that 
time, and, as he said one day, an unofficial secretary. Great 
and serious matters passed through our hands (for the Gen- 
eral and Harrison were taking the lead in virtually reforming 
the whole frontier or debatable land), and these grand affairs 
were often hurried through " like hot cakes." My slender 
legal attainments were several times in requisition on occa- 
sions when the head of the Supreme Court would have been 
a more appropriate referee. I discovered, however, that there 
was really a department of law in which I might have done 
good work. Questions of very serious importance were often 
discussed and disposed of among us three with very great 
economy of time and trouble. And here I may say — " excuse 
the idle word " — that I wonder that I never in all my life fell 
into even the most trifling diplomatic or civil position, when, 
in the opinion of certain eminent friends, I possess several 
qualifications for such a calling — that is, quickness in mas- 
tering the legal bearings of a question, a knowledge of lan- 
guages and countries, readiness in drawing up papers, and 
an insatiable love of labour, which latter I have not found to 
be alivays possessed by the accomplished gentlemen whom 
our country employs abroad. 

I may here narrate a curious incident which touched and 
gratified me. When all the slaves in Nashville were set free 
by the entrance of our troops, the poor souls, to manifest 
their joy, seized a church (nobody opposing), and for three 
weeks held heavy worship for twenty-four hours per diem. 
But not a white soul icas allowed to enter — the real and 
deeply-concealed reason being that Voodoo rites (which 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 285 

gained great headway during the war) formed a part of their 
devotion. However, I was informed that an exception would 
be made in my case, and that I was free to enter. And why ? 
Had Jim surmised, by that marvellous intuition of character 
which blacks possess, that I had in me " the mystery " ? 
Now, to-day I hold and possess the black stone of the Voo- 
doo, the possession of which of itself makes me a grand-mas- 
ter and initiate or adept, and such an invitation would seem 
as natural as one to a five-o'clock tea elsewhere ; but I was 
not known to any one in Nashville as a " cunjerer," and the 
incident strikes me as very curious. 

Apropos of marvels, many of the blacks can produce in 
their throats by some strange process sounds, and even airs, 
resembling those of the harmonicon, or musical box, one or 
the other or both. One evening in Nashville, in a lonely 
place, I heard exquisite music, which I thought must be that 
of a superior hand-organ from afar. But, to my amazement, 
I could discover none ; there were only two black boys in 
the street. Alexis Paxton, the son of my host, explained to 
me that what I heard was unquestionably music made by 
those ebony flutes of boys, and that there v/ere some wonder- 
ful performers in the city. I have listened to the same 
music at a public exhibition. I greatly wonder that I have 
never heard of this kind of music in Europe or the East. It 
is distinctly instrumeyital^ not vocal in its tones. It has the 
obvious recommendation of economy, since by means of it 
a young lady could be performer and pianoforte all in one, 
which was indeed the beginning of the invention in Syrinx, 
who was made into a pan-pipe, which as a piano became the 
great musical curse (according to Heine) of modern times, 
and by which, as I conjecture, the fair Miss Reed or Syrinx 
revenges herself on male humanity. By the way, the best 
singer of ^^ die faro senza Euridice^'' whom I ever heard was 
a Miss Reed, a sister of Mrs. Paran Stevens. 

I had a very pleasant time with Paxton, and I know right 
well that I was no burden on him, but a welcome friend. 



286 MEMOIRS. 

Au reste^ there was plenty of room in the house, and abun- 
dant army stores to be had for asking, and one or two rare 
acquaintances. One of these was a Southern officer, now a 
general, who had come over to our side and fought, as the 
saying was, with a rope round his neck. He was terribly 
hated by the rebels, which hate he returned with red-hot 
double compound interest — for a renegade is worse than ten 
Turks. He was the very type of a grim, calm old Border 
moss-trooper. He lived in his boots, and never had an ounce 
of luggage. One evening General Whipple (always humane 
and cultivated, though as firm as an iron bar) said to him 
before me, " I really don't know what to do Avith many of 
my rebel prisoners. Tliey dress themselves in Federal uni- 
forms for want of other clothes ; they take them from the 
dead on the battlefield, and try to pass themselves off for 
Federals. It is very troublesome." 

" No trouble to me," replied the other. 

" And how do you do with them ? " 

" Shoot them as spies. Why, only last week I got four 
dozen of them, and in less than four minutes I had them all 
laid out stiff in the road." 

The reader need not imagine that the general here ro- 
manced or exaggerated. At that very moment the massacres 
and murders which were going on within three miles of us 
were beyond belief. The bands of guerillas or bushwhackers 
which swept the country murdered in cold blood all who fell 
into their hands, and the Confederate soldiers often did the 
same. There resulted, of course, a deadly hatred on both 
sides, and the most unscrupulous retaliation. 

I could fill a book with the very interesting observations 
which I made in Nashville. And here I call attention to a 
very strange coincidence which this recalls. During the 
previous year I had often expressed a great desire to be in 
some State during its transition from Confederacy to Union- 
ism, that I might witness the remarkable social and political 
paradoxes and events which would result, and I had often 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 287 

specified Tennessee as the one above all others which I should 
prefer to visit for this purpose. And I had about as much 
idea that I should go to the moon as there. But prayers 
are strangely granted at strange hours — -j^Zz^^ impetravi q\iam 
fuissem ausiis — and I was placed in the very centre of the 
wheel. This '^.^ery remarkable fulfilment of a wish, and many 
like it, though due to mere chance, naturally made an im- 
pression on me, for no matter how strong our eyesight may 
be, or our sense of truth, we are all dazed when coming out 
of darkness into light, and all the world is in that condition 
now. No matter how completely we exchange the gloom of 
supernaturalism for the sunlight of science, phantoms still 
seem to flit before our eyes, and, what is more bewildering 
still, we do not as yet know but what these phantoms may be 
physical facts. Perhaps the Voodoo stone may have the 
power to awaken the faith which may move the vital or nerv- 
ous force, which may act on hidden subtler forms of elec- 
tricity and matter, atoms and molecules. Ah ! we have a 
great deal to learn ! 

Through General Whipple's kind aid the brothers Colton 
were at once brought up from the front. With them and 
Captain Paxton we went to Murfreesboro, and at once called 
on the general in command, whose name I have forgotten. 
He struck me as a grim, brave old commander, every inch 
a soldier. While we conversed with him a sergeant entered, 
a man who looked as if he lived in the saddle, and briefly 
reported that a gang of guerillas were assembled at a certain 
place some miles away — I forget how far, but the distance 
was traversed in an incredibly short time. The general issued 
orders for a hundred cavalry to go at once and " get " them. 
They " got " them, killing many, and the next morning, on 
looking from my window, I saw the victors ride into the 
courtyard, many of them with their captives tied neck and 
heels, like bags of corn, over the cruppers of the horses. A 
nice night's ride they must have had ! But the choice was 
between death and being cruppered, and they preferred the 



288 MEMOIRS. 

latter to coming a cropper. Strange that the less a man has 
to live for the more he clings to life. 

The general thought that if he gave us a corporal and 
four men, and if we were well armed, that we might go out 
on the Bole Jack road and return unharmed, " unless we met 
with any of the great gangs of bushwhackers." But he 
evidently thought, as did General Whipple, who did not heed 
a trifle by any means, that we were going into the lion's jaws. 
So the next morning, equo iter ingredi^ I rode forth. I had 
some time before been appointed aide-de-camp to Governor 
Pollock, of Pennsylvania, with the rank of colonel, and had 
now two captains and a corporal with his guard. It was a 
rather small regiment. 

We heard grim stories that morning as to what had taken 
place all around us within almost a few hours. Three 
Federal pickets had been treacherously shot while on guard 
the night before ; the troops had surprised a gang of bush- 
whackers holding a ball, and firing through the windows, 
dropped ten of them dead while dancing ; two men had been 

murdered by and his gang. This was a noted 

guerilla, who was said to have gone south with the Confed- 
erate army, but who was more generally believed to have re- 
mained in hiding, and to have committed most of the worst 
outrages and murders of late. 

At the first house where we stopped in the woods there 
lay a wounded man, one of the victims of the dance the night 
before. The inmates were silent, but not rude to us. I 
offered a man whisky, but he replied, " I don't use it." We 
rode on. Once there was an alarm of " bushwhackers." I 
should have forgotten it but for the memory of the look of 
Baldwin Colton's eyes, the delighted earnestness of a man or 
of a wild creature going to fight. He and his brother had 
hunted and fought guerillas a hundred times, perhaps much 
oftener, for it was a regular daily service at the front. Once 
during a retreat, Baldwin (eighteen or nineteen years of age) 
fell out of rank so often to engage in hand-to-hand sword 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 2Sd 

conflicts with rebel cayalrymen, that his brother detached 
four to take him prisoner and keep him safe. Daring spirits 
among our soldiers often became very fond of this kind of 
duelling, in which the rebs were not a whit behind them, and 
two of the infantry on either side would, under cover of the 
bushes, aim and pop away at one another perhaps for hours, 
like two red Indians. 

I have forgotten whether it was with extra whisky, coffee, 
or money that we specially gratified our corporal and guard ; 
but Baldwin, who vfas " one of 'em," informed me that they 
enjoyed this little outing immensel}^, just like a picnic, and 
had a good time. From which it may be inferred that men's 
ideas of enjoyment are extremely relative. It could not have 
been in the dodging of guerillas — to that they were accus- 
tomed ; perhaps it was the little extra ration, or the mystery 
of the excursion, for they were much puzzled to know what 
I wanted, why I examined the road and rocks, and all so 
strangely, and went into the very worst place in all the land 
to do so. Baldwin Colton himself had been so knocked 
about during the war, and so starved as a prisoner in South- 
ern hands, that he looked back on a sojourn in that ergastu- 
Imn^ Libby Prison, as rather an oasis in his sad experiences. 
" It wasn't so bad a place as some, and there was good com- 
pany, and always something to eat.'''* The optimist of Can- 
dide was a Mallock in mourning compared to this. 

That night we came to somebody's plantation. I forget 
his name, but he was a Union man, probably a very recent 
acquisition, but genial. He had read the Knickerhocher^ and 
knew my name well, and took good care of us. In the 
morning I offered him ten dollars for our night's lodging, 
which was, in the opinion of my two captains, stupendously 
liberal, as soldiers never paid. Our host declined it like a 
Southern planter, on the ground that he never sold his hos- 
pitality. So I put the money into the hand of one of his 
pretty children as a present. But as we rode forth we were 
called back, and reminded that we had forgotten to pay for 



290 MEMOIRS. 

the soldiers ! I gave another five-dollar greenback and rode 
away disgusted. And at the gate a negro girl begged us to 
give her a " dalla " (dollar) to buy a fish-line. It all came 
from my foolish offer to pay. Gratitude is a sense of further 
benefits to be bestowed. 

The place where the oil had been seen was near a conical 
rocky hill called Grindstone Knob. We examined carefully 
and found no trace of it. The geology of the country was 
unfavourable, much flint and conglomerate, if I remember, 
and wanting in the signs of coal, shales, &c., and " faults " 
or ravines. I may be quite wrong, but such was my opinion. 
No one who lived thereabout had ever heard of " ile." Once 
I asked a rustic if any kind of oil was found in the neigh- 
bourhood in springs. His reply was, " What ! He come up 

outer the ground like water ! H ! I never heard of sitch 

a thing." There tvas no oil. 

At the foot of Grindstone Knob was a rather neat, small 
house, white, with green blinds. We were somewhat aston- 
ished to learn from a negro boy, who spoke the most astonish- 
ingly bad English, that this was the home of Mas' . 

Yes, this was the den of the wolf himself, and I had no 
doubt that he was not far off. There was a small cotton 
plantation round about. 

We entered, and were received by a good-looking, not 
unladylike, but rather fierce-eyed young woman and her 

younger sister. It was Mrs. . The two had been to a 

lady's seminary in Nashville, and played the piano for us. I 
felt that we were in a strange situation, and now and then 
walked to the window and looked out, listening all the time 
suspiciously to every sound. It was easy enough for Mrs. 

, the brigand's wife, to perceive from my untanned 

complexion that I had not been in the field, and was mani- 
festly no soldier. '•^You look like an officer," she said to 
Captain Colton, " and so does that one, but what is he 9 " 
meaning me by this last. We had dinner — roast kid — and 
when we departed I gave the dame five dollars, having 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 291 

the feeling that I could not be indebted to thieves for a 
dinner. 

We had gone but a little distance when we saw two bush- 
whackers with guns, and gave chase, but they disappeared in 
the bushes, much to the grief of our men, who would have 
liked either to shoot them or to bring them in. Then the 
corporal told us that while we were at dinner 's " faith- 
ful blacks " had informed his men that " Mas' had been 

at home ever since Crismas " ; that at eleven o'clock every 
night they assembled at the house and thence went out ma- 
rauding and murdering. 

I paused, astonished and angry. It was almost certain 
that the bushwhacker had been during dinner probably in 
the cellar under our feet. The guerillas had great fear of 
our regular soldiers ; two of the latter were a match at any 
time for half-a-dozen of the former, as was proved continually. 

Should I go back and hang up over his own door ? I 

was dying to do it, but we had before us a very long ride 
through the Cedar Barrens, the sun was sinking in the west, 
and we had heard news which made it extremely likely that 
a large band of guerillas would be in the way. 

That resolve to go actually saved our lives, for I heard 
the next day that a hundred and fifty of these free murderers 
had gone on our road just after us. This fact was at once 

transferred to the Northern ncAvspapers, that " on a 

hundred and fifty bushwhackers passed over the Bole Jack 
road." Which was read by my wife and father, who knew 
that on that very day I was on that road, to their great ap- 
prehension. 

I never shall forget the dismal appearance of the Cedar 
Barrens. The soil was nowhere more than two inches deep, 
and the trees which covered it by millions had all died as 
soon as they attained a height of fifteen or twenty feet. 
Swarms of ill-omened turkey-buzzards were the only living 
creatures visible " like foul lemur es flitting in the gloom." 

Riding over the battlefield the Coltons and Paxton 



292 MEMOIRS. 

pointed out many things, for they had all been in it severely. 
At one place, Major Rosengarten, a brother of my old Paris 
fellow-student, had had a sabre-fight with a rebel, and they 
told me how Rosengarten's sword, being one of the kind 
which was issued by contract in the earlier days of the war, 
bent and broke like a piece of tin. Hearing a ringing sound, 
Baldwin jumped from his horse, picked up a steel ramrod, 
and gave it to me for a cane. 

As we approached Murfreesboro' I met a genial, daring 
soldier, one Major Hill, whom I had seen before. He had 
with him a hundred and fifty cavalry. " Where are you 
going so late by night ? " I said. 

He replied, " I am after that infernal scoundrel, 

. My scouts have found out pretty closely his range. 



I am going to divide my men into tens and scatter them over 
the country and then close in." 

" Major," I replied, " I will tell you just where to lay 
your hand at once, heavy on him. Do you know Grindstone 
Knob and a white house with green windows at its foot? " 

" I do." 

" Well, be there at exactly eleven to-night, and you'll get 
him. I have been there and learned it from the niggers." 

" Well, I declare that you are a good scout, Mr. Leland ! " 
cried the Major in amazement. " What can I do to thank 
you?" 

" Well, Major Hill," I said, " I have one thing to request : 

that is, if you get , don't parole him. Slioot him at 

once ; he is a red-handed murderer." 

" I will shoot him," said the Major, and rode forth into 

the night with his men. But whether he ever got 

I never knew, though according to the calculations of 



the Coltons, who were extremely experienced in such matters, 

" Massa " had not more than one chance in a thousand 

to escape, and Hill was notoriously a good guerilla-hunter 
and a man of his word. 

I believe that at the plantation our men had camped out. 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 293 

At Murfreesboro' we returned them to the general, and I 
took the Coltons to a hotel, which was so very rough that 
I apologised for it, while Baldwin said it seemed to him to 
be luxurious bej^ond belief, and that it was the first night for 
eighteen months in which he had slept in a bed. In the 
morning I wanted a spur, having lost one of mine, and there 
was brought to me a large boxful of all kinds of spurs to 
choose from, which had been left in the house at one time or 
another during the war. 

I did not remain long in ISTashville after returning 
thither. I had instructions to go to Louisville, Kentucky, 
and there consult with a certain merchant as to certain 
lands. General Whipple accompanied me to the " depot," 
which was for the time and place as much of an honour as if 
Her Majesty were to come to see me off at Victoria Station. 
There was many and many a magnate in those days and 
there, who would have given thousands to have had his ear 
as Paxton and I had it. 

One night we were in the side private box at the theatre 
in Nashville. Couldock, whom I had known well many 
years before, was on the stage. The General was keeping 
himself deeply in the shade to remain unseen. He re- 
marked to Paxton that he wanted a house for his familv, 
who would soon arrive, and could not find one, for they were 
all occupied. This one remark shows the man. I wonder 
how long General Butler would have hesitated to move any- 
body ! 

Captain Paxton knew everything and everybody. With 
a quick glance from his keen dark eyes he exclaimed — 

" I've got it ! Do you see that fat man laughing so 
heartil}^ in the pit ? He has a splendid house ; it would 

just suit you ; and he's a d d old rebel. I know enough 

about him to hang him three times over. He has" (here 
followed a series of political iniquities). " Voila voire aff aire.'''' 

" And how is it that he has kept his house ? " asked the 
General. 



294 MEMOIRS. 

*' He sent the quartermaster a barrel of wliisky, or some- 
thing of that sort." 

The General looked thoughtfully at the fat man as the 
latter burst into a fresh peal of laughter. I thought that if 
he had known what was being said in our box that laugh 
would have died away. 

I do not know whether the General took the house. I 
think he did. I left for Louisville. There I saw the great 
merchant, who invited me to his home to supper and con- 
sulted with me. His daughters were rebels and would not 
speak to me. He had a great deal of property in Indiana, 
which might be oil-lands. If I would visit it and report on 
it, he would send his partner with me to examine it. I con- 
sented to go. 

This partner, Mr. W., was a young man of agreeable, easy 
manners. With him I went to Indianapolis, and thence by 
" stages," waggons, or on horseback through a very dismal 
country in gloomy winter into the interior of the State. I 
can remember vast marshy fields with millions of fiddler crabs 
scuttling over them, and more mud than I had ever seen in 
my life. The village streets were six inches deep in soft 
mud up to the doors and floors of the houses. At last we 
reached our journey's end at a large log-house on a good 
farm. 

I liked the good man of the house. He said to us, after a 
time, that at first he thought we were a couple of stuck-up 
city fellows, but had found to his joy that we were old-fash- 
ioned, sensible people. There was no sugar at his supper- 
table, but he had three substitutes for it — " tree-sweetnin', bee- 
sweetnin', and sorghum " — that is, maple sugar, honey, and 
the molasses made from Chinese maize. Only at a mile's dis- 
tance there was a " sugar-camp," and we could see the fires 
and hear the shouts of the people engaged night and day in 
making sugar from the trees. 

He told me that on the hills in sight a mysterious light 
often wandered. During the Revolutionary war some one 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 295 

had buried a barrelf ul of silver plate and money, and over it 
flitted the quivering silver flame, but no one could ever find 
the spot. 

The next day I examined the land. There was abundance 
of fossiliferous limestone, rich in petrifactions of tertiary 
shells, also cartloads of beautiful geodes or round flint balls, 
which often rattled, and which, when broken, were encrusted 
with white or purple amethystine crystals. I decided that 
there were places where oil might be found, though there 
was certainly no indication of it. I believe that my conjec- 
ture subsequently proved to be true, and that Indiana has 
shown herself to be a wise virgin not without oil. 

On the afternoon of the next day, riding with my guide, 
I found that I had left my blanket at a house miles behind. 
I offered the man a large price to return and bring it, which 
he did. While waiting by the wood, in a dismal drizzle, I 
saw a log cabin and went to it for shelter. Its only inmate 
Avas a young woman, who, seeing me coming, hastily locked 
the door and rushed into the neighbouring woods. When the 
guide returned I expressed some astonishment at the flight ; 
lie did not. With a very grave expression he asked me, " Don't 
the gals in your part of the country allays break for the woods 
when they see yo^t a-coming ? " " Certainly not/' I replied. 
To which he made answer, " Thank God, our gals here hev 
got better morrils than yourn." 

We returned to St. Louis. There I was shown the im- 
mensely long tomb of Porter the Kentucky giant. This 
man was nine feet in height ! I had seen him alive long 
before in Philadelphia. I made several interesting acquaint- 
ances in St. Louis, the Athens of the West. But I must 
hurry on. 

I went to Cincinnati, where I found orders to wait for Mr. 
Lea. A syndicate had been formed in Providence, Rhode 
Island, which had purchased a great property in Cannelton, 
West Virginia. This consisted of a mountain in which there 
was an immense deposit of cannel coal. Cannelton was very 



296 MEMOIRS. 

near the town of Charleston, which is at the junction of the 
Kanawha (a tributary of the Ohio) and Elk rivers. 

I waited a week at the hotel in Cincinnati for Mr. Lea. 
It was a weary week, for I had no acquaintances and made 
none. Never in my life before did I see so many Sardines, 
or JPhilistines of the dullest stamp as at that hotel. But at 
last Mr. Lea came with a party of ladies and gentlemen. A 
small steamboat was secured, and we went up the Ohio. The 
voyage was agreeable and not without some incidents. There 
was a freshet in the river, and one night, taking a short cut 
over a cornfield, the steamboat stuck fast — like Eve — in an 
apple-tree. 

One day one of the party asked me what was the greatest 
aggregate deposit of coal known in England. I could not 
answer. A few hours after we stopped at a town in Ken- 
tucky. There I discovered by chance some old Patent Office 
reports, and among them all the statistics describing the coal 
mines in England. When v/e returned to the boat I told my 
informant that the largest deposit in England was just half 
that of Cannelton, and added many details. Mr. Lea was 
amazed at my knowledge. I told him that I deserved no 
credit, for I had picked it up by chance. " Yes," he replied, 
" and how was it that you chanced to read that book ? None 
of us did. Such chances come to inquiring minds." 

It also chanced that this whole country abounded in signs 
of petroleum. It was found floating on springs. The com- 
pany possessed rights of royalty on thousands of acres on Elk 
Eiver, which was as yet in the debatable land, harassed by 
rebels. These claims, however, were "run out," and needed 
to be renewed by signatures from the residents. They were 
in the hands of David Goshorn, who kept the only "tavern" 
or hotel in Charleston, and he asked $5,000 for his rights. 
There was another party in the field after them. 

I verily believe that David Goshorn sold the right to me 
because he played the fiddle and I the guitar, and because he 
did not like the rival, who was a Yankee, while I was a con- 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 297 

genial companion. Many a journey had we together, and as 
I appreciated him as a marked character of odd oppositions, 
we got on admirably. 

In Cannelton I went down into a coal mine and risked 
my life strangely in ascending a railway. The hill is 1,500 
feet in height, and on its face is a railway which ascends at 
an angle of 15°, perhaps the steepest in America. I ascended 
in it, and soon observed that of the two strands of the iron 
cable which drew it one was broken. The very next week 
the other broke, and two men were killed by an awful death, 
they and the car falling a thousand feet to the rocks below. 

The next week we returned to Cincinnati, and thence to 
Philadelphia. On my way from New York to Providence I 
became acquainted in the train with a modest, gentlemanly 
man, who told me he was a great-grandson or descendant of 
Thomson who wrote the " Seasons." I thought him both 
great and grand in an incident which soon occurred. A burly, 
bull-necked fellow in the car was attacked with an epileptic 
fit. He roared, kicked, screamed like a wildcat ; and among 
fifty men in the vehicle, I venture to say that only Thomson 
and I, in a lesser degree, showed any plain common sense. 
I darted at the epileptic, grappled with him, held him down 
by what might be called brutal kindness, for I held his head 
down, while I sat on his arm and throttled him sans merci — 
I avow it — and tore off in haste his neckcloth (his neck was 
frightfully swelled), while Thomson brought cold water from 
the " cooler," with which we bathed his face freely, and 
chafed his pulse and forehead. Little by little he recovered. 
The other passengers, as usual, did nothing, and a little old 
naval officer, who had been fifty years in service (as Thom- 
son told me), simply kicked and screamed convulsively, 
" Take him away ! take him away ! " The epileptic was 
George Christy, the original founder of the Christy Minstrels. 
I can never think of this scene without exclaiming, " Vive 
Thomson ! " for he was the only man among us who dis- 
played quiet self-possession and savoir faire. As for me, my 



298 MEMOIRS. 

" old lujun " was up, and I had " sailed in " for a fight by 
mere impulse. Vive Thomson ! Bo7i scmg ne peut onentir. 

I went to Providence, where I was empowered to return 
to Cannelton to pay Goshorn $5,000, and renew the leases 
on Elk River. I should have to travel post to anticipate the 
Yankee. It was not concealed from me that even if I suc- 
ceeded, I had before me a very dangerous and difficult task. 
But after what I had already gone through with I was ready 
for anything. I was really developing rapidly a wild, reck- 
less spirit — the " Injun " was coming out of me. My old 
life and self had vanished like dreams. Only now and then, 
in the forests or by torrents, did something like poetry re- 
visit me ; literature was dead in me. Only once did I, in a 
railway train, compose the "Maiden mit nodings on." I 
bore it in my memory for years before I wrote it out. 

I arrived in Philadelphia. The next morning I was to 
rise early and fly westward. No time to lose. Before I rose, 
my sister knocked at the door and told us the awful news 
that President Lincoln had been murdered I 

As I went to the station I saw men v/eeping in the streets, 
and everybody in great grief, conversing with strangers, as if 
all had lost a common relation. Everywhere utter misery ! 
I arrived in Pittsburg. It was raining, and the black pall of 
smoke which always clothes the town was denser than ever, 
and the long black streamers which hung everywhere as 
mourning made the whole place unutterably ghastly. In 
the trains nothing but the murder was spoken of. There 
was a young man who had been in the theatre and witnessed 
the murder, which he described graphically and evidently 
truthfullv. 

I reached Cincinnati, and as soon as possible hurried on 
board the steamboat. We went along to Charleston, and it 
will hardly be believed that I very nearly missed the whole 
object of my journey by falling asleep. AVe had but one 
more very short distance to go, when, overcome by fatigue, I 
dropped into a nap. Fortunately I was awakened by the last 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 299 

ringing of the bell, and, seizing my carpet-bag, ran ashore 
just as the plank was to be withdrawn. 

I went directly to Goshorn's hotel. He was a stout, burly 
man, shrewd in his way, good-natured, but not without tem- 
per and impulses. He looked keenly after business, played 
the fiddle, and performed a few tricks of legerdemain. He 
had a ladylike wife, and both were very kind to me, epecially 
after they came to know me pretty well. The lady had a 
nice, easy horse, which ere long was lent me freely whenever 
I wanted to ride. One day it was missing. The master 
grieved. They had named it after me in compliment. 
" Goshorn," I said, " in future I shall call you Horse-gone.'''' 
But he was not pleased with the name. However, it was re- 
covered by a miracle, for the amount of horse-stealing which 
went on about us then was fabulous. 

After a few days Goshorn and I prepared to go up Elk 
River, to renew the leases of oil and coal lands. Now I must 
premise that at all times the man who was engaged in " ile " 
bore a charmed life, and was venerated by both Union men 
and rebels. He could pass the lines and go anywhere. At 
one time, when not a spy could be got into or out of Rich- 
mond to serve us, Goshorn seriously proposed to me to go 
with him into the city ! I had a neighbour named Fassit, an 
uncle of Theodore. He had oil-wells in Virginia, and when 
the war begun work on them was stopped. This dismayed 
the natives. One morning there came to Mr, Fassit a letter 
imploring him to return : " Come back, o come agin and 
bore us some more wels. We wil protec you like a son. 
We dont make war on //e." And I, being thus respected, 
went and came from the Foeman's Land, and joined in the 
dreadful rebel-ry and returned unharmed, leading a charmed 
if not particularly charming life all winter and the spring, 
to the great amazement and bewilderment of many, as will 
appear in the sequence. 

The upper part of Elk River was in the debatable land, 
or rather still in Slave-ownia or rebeldom, where a Union 



300 MEMOIRS. 

man's life was worth about a chinquapin. In fact, one day 
there was a small battle between me and home — with divers 
wounds and deaths. This going and coming of mine, among 
and with rebels, got me into a droll misunderstanding some 
time after. But I think that the real cause lay less in oil 
than in the simple truth that these frank, half-wild fellows 
liked me. One said to me one day, " You're onlike all 
the Northern men who come here, and we all like you. 
What's the reason ? " I explained it that he had only met 
with Yankees, and that as Pennsylvania lay next to Virginia, 
of course we must be more alike as neighbours. But the 
cause lay in the liking which I have for Indians, gypsies, and 
all such folk. 

Goshorn began by buying a dug-out poplar canoe sixty- 
four feet in length, and stocking it with provisions. " Money 
vf on't be of much use," he said ; " what we want chiefly is 
whisky and blue beads for presents." He hired two men 
who had been in the Confederate army, but who had ab- 
sented themselves since the proceedings had become uninter- 
esting. These men took to me with a devotion which ended 
by becoming literally superstitious. I am quite sure that, 
while naturally intelligent, anything like a mind stored with 
varied knowledge was something utterly unknown to them. 
And as I, day by day, let fall unthinkingly this or that scrap 
of experience or of knowledge, they began to regard me as a 
miracle. One day one of them, Sam Fox, said to me mean- 
ingly, that I liked curious things, and that he knew a nest 
where he could get me a young raven. The raven is to an 
Indian conjuror what a black cat is to a witch, and I suppose 
that Sam thought I must be lonely without a familiar. 
Which recalls one of the most extraordinary experiences of 
all my life. 

During my return down the river, it was in a freshet, and 
we went headlong. This is to the very last degree dangerous, 
unless the boatmen know every rock and point, for the dug- 
out canoe goes over at a touch, and there is no life to be 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 301 

saved in the rapids. Now we were %ing like a swallow, and 
could not stop. There was one narrow shoot, or pass, just in 
the middle of the river, where there was exactly room to an 
inch for a canoe to pass, but to do this it was necessary to 
have moonlight enough to see the King Rock, which rose in 
the stream close by the passage, and at the critical instant to 
" fend off " with the hand and prevent the canoe from driv- 
ing full on the rock. A terrible storm was coming up, 
thunder was growling afar, and clouds fast gathering in 
the sky. 

The men had heard me talking the day before as to how 
storms were formed in circles, and it had deeply impressed 
them. When Goshorn asked them what we had better do, 
they said, " Leave it all to Mr. Leland ; he knows every- 
thing." I looked at the moon and saw that the clouds were 
not driving dead against it, but around while closing in, and 
I know not by what strange inspiration I added, " You will 
have just time to clear King Eock ! " 

It was still far away. I laid down my paddle and drew 
my blanket round me, and smoked to the storm, and sang 
incantations to myself. It was a fearful trial, actually risk- 
ing death, but I felt no fear — only a dull confidence in fate. 
Closer grew the clouds — darker the sky — when during the 
very last second of light King Eock came in sight. Goshorn 
was ready with his bull-like strength and gave the push ; 
and just as we shot clear into the channel it became dark as 
pitch, and the rain came down in a torrent. Goshorn jDitched 
his hat high into the air — aux moulins — and hurrahed and 
cried in exulting joy. 

"Now, Mr. Leland, sing us that German song you're 
always so jolly with — lodle yodle tol de rol de rol ! " 

From that hour I was Kcliee-Bo-o-in or Grand Pow-wow 
to Sam Fox and his friends. He believed in me, even as I 
believe in myself when such mad " spells " come over me. 
One day he proved his confidence. It was bright and sun- 
shiny, and we were paddling along when we saw a " summer 
14 



302 MEMOIRS. 

duck " swimming perhaps fifty yards ahead. Sam was sitting 
in the bow exactly between me and the duck. " Fire at it 
with your revolver ! " cried Sam. , 

" It is too far away," I replied, " and you are right in the 
way." 

Sam bent over sideways, glaring at me with his one 
strange eye. It was just about as close a shot as was William 
Tell's at the apple. But I knew that reputation for nerve 
depended on it, so I fired. As the duck rose it dropped a 
feather. 

" I knew you'd hit ! " cried Sam triumphantly. And so 
I had, but I should not like to try that shot again. 

Eeflex action of the brain and secondary automatism ! It 
must be so — Haeckel, thou reasonest well. But when the 
" old Injun " and my High-Dutch ancestor are upon me, I 
reason not at all, and then I see visions and dream dreams, 
and it always comes true, without the least self-deception or 
delusion. 

It is a marvellous thing that in these canoes, which tip over 
so easily, men will pass over mill-dams ten or twelve feet high, 
as I myself have done many a time, without upsetting. The 
manner of it is this. The canoe is a log hollowed out. This 
is allowed to pass over till it dips like a seesaw, or falls into 
the stream below. It is a dangerous, reckless act, but gen- 
erally succeeds. One day Sam Fox undertook to shoot our 
dug-out over a fall. So he paddled hard, and ran the canoe 
headlong to edge, he being in the bow. But it stuck half- 
way, and there was my Samuel, ere he knew it, high in the 
air, paddling in the atmosphere, into which thirty feet of 
canoe was raised. 

Meanwhile, the legal business and renewal of the leases 
and the payment of money was performed accurately and 
punctually. Talk about manna in the wilderness ! money in 
the wilderness came to the poor souls impoverished by the 
war as a thousandfold nicer. But over and above that, half 
a pound of coffee or a drink of whisky would cause a thrill 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 303 

of delight. One day, stopping at a logger's camp, I gave a 
decent-looking man a tin cup full of whisky. The first thing 
he did was to put it to the mouth of a toddling two-year-old 
child, and it took a good pull. I remonstrated with him for 
it, when he replied, " Well, you see, sir, we get it so seldom, 
that whisky is a kind o' delicacy with us." 

Sometimes the log huts were twenty miles apart. In 
such isolation there is no rivalry of ostentation, and men care 
only to live. One day we came to a log house. The occu- 
pant had several hundred acres of very good land, and only 
a half acre under cultivation. He was absent at a county 
court for amusement. All that I could see in the cabin was 
a rude seat, an iron pot and spoon, and a squirrel-gun. 
There were two cavities or holes in the bare earth floor, in 
which the old man and his wife slept, each wrapped in a 
blanket. Even our boatman said that such carelessness was 
unusual. But all were ignorant of a thousand refinements 
of life of which the poorest English peasant knoivs some- 
thing, yet every one of these people had an independence or 
pride far above all poverty. 

One night we stopped at the house of a man who was 
said to possess $150,000 (£30,000) worth of land. The 
house was well enough. His two bare-legged daughters, 
girls of seventeen or eighteen, lounged about smoking pipes. 
I gave one a cigar. She replied, " I don't keer if I do try it. 
I've allays wanted to know what a cigar smokes like." But 
she didn't like it. Apropos of girls, I may say that there is 
a far higher standard of morals among these people than 
among the ignorant elsewhere. 

It was indeed a wild country. One day Goshorn showed 
me a hill, and a hunter had told him that when standing on 
it one summer afternoon he had seen in a marshy place the 
very unusual spectacle of forty bears, all wallowing together 
in the mud and playing at once. Also the marks of a bear's 
claws on a tree. Game was plenty in this region. All the 
time that I stayed with Goshorn we had every day at his 



304 MEMOIRS. 

well-furnished table bear's meat, veuison, or other game, fish, 
ham, chickens, &c. 

There was a great deal of very beautiful scenery on Elk 
River, and some of its " incidents " were marvellously strange. 
The hard sandstone rocks had worn into shapes resembling 
castles and houses, incredibly like buildings made by man. 
One day I saw and copied a vast square rock through which 
ran to the light a perfect Gothic archway sixty feet high, 
with a long wall like the side of a castle, and an immense 
square tower. There are the most natural-looking houses 
and Schlosser imaginable rising all alone in the forest. Very 
often the summits of the hills were crowned with round tow- 
ers. On the Ohio River there is a group of these shaped like 
segments of a truncated cone, and " corniced " with another 
piece reversed, like this : 




I 



/^'^ 



These are called " Devil's Tea-tables." I drew them sev- 
eral times, but could never give them the appearance of be- 
ing natural objects. It is very extraordinary how Nature 
seems to have mocked man in advance in these structures. 
In Fingal's Cave there is an absolutely original style of archi- 
tecture. 

The last house which we came to was the best. In it 
dwelt a gentlemanly elderly man with two ladylike daugh- 
ters. His son, who was dressed in " store clothes," had been 
a delegate to the Wheeling Convention. But the war had 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 305 

borne hard on them, and for a long time everything which 
they used or wore had been made by their own hands. They 
had a home-made loom and spinning-wheel — I saw several 
such looms on the river ; they raised their own cotton and 
wool and maple sugar, and were in all important details 
utterly self-sustaining and independent. And they did not 
live rudely at all, but like ladies and gentlemen, as really in- 
telligent people always can when they are free. The father 
had, not long before, standing in his own door, shot a deer 
as it looked over the garden gate at him. Goshorn, observ- 
ing that I attached some value to the horns (a new idea to 
him), secured them for himself. 

A day or two after, while descending the river, we stopped 
to see an old hunter who lived on the bank. He w^as a very 
shrewd, quaint old boy, " good for a novel." He examined 
Goshorn's spectacles with so much interest, that I suspect it 
was really the first time in his life that he ever fully ascer- 
tained the " true inwardness and utilitarianism " of such ob- 
jects. He expressed great admiration, and said that if he 
had them he could get twice as many deer as he did. I 
promised to send him a pair. I begged from him deer-horns, 
which he gave me very willingly, expressing wonder that I 
wanted such rubbish, and at my delight. And seeing that 
my companion had a pair, he said scornfully : 

"Dave Goshorn, what do yoit know about such things? 
What's set yoic to gittin' deer's horns ? Give 'em to this here 
young gentleman, who understands such things that we don't, 
and who wants 'em fur some good reason.^' 

I will do Goshorn the justice to say that he gave them to 
me for a parting present. My room at his house was quite 
devoid of all decoration, but by arranging on the walls crossed 
canoe-paddles, great bunches of the picturesque locust-thorn, 
often nearly a foot in length, and the deer's horns, I made it 
look rather more human. But this arrangement utterly be- 
wildered the natives, especially the maids, who naively asked 
me why I hung them old bones and thorns up in my room. 



306 MEMOIRS. 

As this thorn is much used by the blacks in Voodoo, I sup- 
pose that it was all explained by being set down to my " con- 
jurin . 

The maid who attended to my room was a very nice, good 
girl, but one who could not have been understood in Eng- 
land. I found that she gathered up and treasured many 
utterly worthless trifling bits of pen-drawing which I threw 
away. She explained that where she came from on Coal River, 
anything like a picture was a great curiosity ; also that her 
friends believed that all the pictures in books, newspapers, &c., 
were drawn by hand. I explained to her how they were made. 
When I left I offered her two dollars. She hesitated, and 
then said, " Mr. Leland, there have been many, many gentle- 
men here who have offered me money, but I never took a 
cent from any man till noiv. And I ivill take this from you 
to buy something that I can remember you by, for you have 
always treated me kindly and like a lady." In rural America 
such girls are really lady-helps, and not " servants," albeit 
those who know how to get on with them find them the very 
best servants in the world ; but they must be treated as 
friends. 

I went up Elk River several times on horse or in canoe 
to renew leases or to lease new land, &c. The company sent 
on a very clever and intelligent rather young man named 
Sandford, who had been a railroad superintendent, to help 
me. I liked him very much. We had a third, a young Vir- 
ginian, named Finnal. At or near Cannelton I selected a 
spot where we put up a steam-engine, and began to bore for 
oil. It was very near the famous gas-well which once be- 
longed to General Washington. This well gave forth every 
week the equivalent of 07ie hundred and fifty tons of coal. 
It was utilised in a factory. After I sunk our shaft it gave 
out ; but I do not believe that we stopped it, for no gas came 
into our well. Finnal was the superintendent of the well. 
One day he nearly sat down — undo podice — on an immense 
rattlesnake. He had a little cottage and a fine horse. He 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 307 

kept the latter in a stable and painted tlie door ivliite, so that 
when waking in the night he could see if any horse-thief had 
opened it. Many efforts were made to rob him of it. 

At this time Lee's army was disbanded, and fully one-half 
came straggling in squads up the valley to Charleston to be 
paroled. David Goshorn's hotel was simply crammed with 
Confederate officers, who slept anywhere. With these I 
easily became friends ; they seemed like Princeton Southern 
college mates. Now I have to narrate a strange story. One 
evening when I was sitting and smoking on the portico with 
some of these ions compagnoris I said to one — 

" People say that your men never once during the war 
got within sight of Harrisburg or of a Northern city. But I 
believe they did. One day when I was on guard I saw five 
men scout on the bank in full sight of it. But nobody 
agreed with me." 

The officer laughed silently, and cried aloud to a friend 
with a broken arm in a sling, who lay within a room on a 

bed, " Come out here, L . Here is something which will 

interest you more than anything you ever heard before." 

He came out, and, having heard my story, said — 

" Nobody ever believed your story, nor did anybody ever 
believe mine. Mine is this — that when we were at Sporting 
Hill a corporal of mine came in and declared that he and his 
men had scouted into within full sight of Harrisburg. I 
knew that the man told the truth, but nobody else would be- 
lieve that any human being dared to do such a thing, or 
could do it. And now you fully prove that it was done." 

There came to Goshorn's three very interesting men with 
whom I became intimate. One was Eobert Hunt, of St. 
Louis. He was of a very good Virginia family, had been at 
Princeton College, ran away in his sixteenth year, took to 
the plains as a hunter, and for twenty-three years had ranged 
the Wild West from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific. 
At the end of the time an uncle in the Fur Company had 
helped him on, and he was now rich. He was one of the 



308 MEMOIRS. 

most genial, gay, and festive, reckless yet always gentlemanly 
men I ever knew. He expressed great astonishment, as he 
learned gradually to know me, at finding we were so con- 
genial, and that I had so much " real Injun " in me. His 
eyes were first opened to this great fact by a very singular 
incident, of which I can never think without pleasure. 

Hunt, with two men who had been cavalry captains all 
through the war, and his friend Eoss, who had long been an 
Indian trader, and I, were all riding up Elk Valley to look at 
lands. We paused at a place where the road sloped sideways 
and was wet with rain. As I was going to remount, I asked 
a German who stood by to hold my horse's head, and sprang 
into the saddle. Just at this critical instant — it all passed in 
a second — as the German had not heard me, my horse, feel- 
ing that he must fall over on his left side from my weight, 
threw himself completely over iackivard. As quick as 
thought I jumped up on his back, put my foot just between 
the saddle and his tail, and took a tremendous flying leap so 
far that I cleared the horse. I only muddied the palms of 
my gloves, on which I fell. 

The elder cavalry captain said, " When I saw that horse 
go over backwards, I closed my eyes and held my breath, for 
I expected the next second to see you killed." But Eobert 
Hunt exclaimed, " Good as an Injun, by God ! " And when 
I some time after made fun of it, he shook his head gravely 
and reprovingly, as George Ward did over the gunpowder, 
and said, " It was a magnificent thing ! " 

That very afternoon Hunt distinguished himself in a 
manner which was quite as becoming an aborigine. I was 
acting as guide, and knowing that there was a ford across a 
tributary of the Elk, sought and thought I had found it. 
But I was mistaken, and what was horrible, we found our- 
selves in a deep quicksand. On such occasions horses be- 
come, as it were, insane, trying to throw the riders and then 
jump on them for support. By good luck we got out of it 
soon, but there was an awful five minutes of kicking, plung- 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 309 

ing, splashing, and " ground and lofty " swearing. I got 
across dry by drawing my legs up before me on the saddle, 
a la tailor, but the others were badly wet. But no sooner 
had we emerged from the stream than Robert Hunt, bursting 
into a tremendous '•^Ho I ho I " of deep laughter, declared that 
he had shown more presence of mind during the emergency 
than any of us ; for, brandishing his whisky flask, he de- 
clared that while his horse was in the flurry it occurred to 
him that the best thing he could do was to lighten the load, 
and he had therefore, with incredible presence of mind, 
drunk up all the whisky ! 

However, he afterwards confessed to me that the true 
reason was that, believing death was at hand, and thinking it 
a pity to die thirsty, he had drained the bottle, as did the old 
Indian woman just as she went over the Falls of Niagara. 
Anyhow, the incorrigible vaiti'ien hsid really emptied his flask 
while in the " quick." 

Though I say it, I believe that Hunt and I were a pretty 
well matched couple, and many a wild prank and Indian-like 
joke did we play together. More than once he expressed 
great astonishment that I, a man grown up in cities and to 
literary pursuits, should be so much at home where he found 
me, or so congenial. He had been at Princeton, and, ex pede 
Herculem, had a point whence to judge me, but it failed.* 
His friend Ross was a quiet, sensible New Englander, wdio 
reminded me of xirtemus Ward, or Charles Browne. He 
abounded in quaint anecdotes of Indian experiences. 

As did also a Mr. Wadsworth, who had passed half his 
life in the Far West as a surveyor among the Chippeways. 
He had written a large manuscript of their legends, of which 
Schoolcraft made great use in his AJgic book. I believe that 
much of Longfellow's Hiaivatlia owed its origin thus indi- 

* The reader may jfind some interesting references to Robert Hunt 
in the Introduction by me to the Life of James Beckwoiirth, the famous 
chief of the Crow Indians. London : T. Fisher Unwin, 1803. 



310 MEMOIRS. 

rectly to Mr. Wadsworth. In after years I wrote out many 
of his tales, as told to me, in articles in Temple Bar. 

The country all about Charleston was primitively wild 
and picturesque, rocky, hilly, and leading to solitary life and 
dreams of sylvani and forest fairies. There were fountained 
hills, and dreamy darkling woods, and old Indian graves, and 
a dancing stream, across which lay a petrified tree, and every- 
where a little travelled land. I explored it with Goshorn, 
riding far and wide into remote mountain recesses, to get the 
signatures in attestation of men who could rarely write, but 
on the other hand could " shoot their mark " with a rifle 
to perfection, and who would assuredly have placed such 
signature on me had I not been a holy messenger of /?e, and 
an angel of coming moneyed times. 

One day we stopped at a farm-house in a wild, lonely place. 
There was only an old woman there — one of the stern, resolute, 
hard-muscled frontier women, the daughters of mothers who 
had fought " Injuns " — and a calf. And thereby hung a tale, 
which the three men with me fully authenticated. 

The whole country thereabouts had been for four years so 
worried, harried, raided, raked, plundered, and foraged by 
Federals and Confederates — one day the former, the next the 
latter ; blue and grey, or sky and sea — that the old lady had 
nothing left to live on. Hens, cows, horses, corn, all had 
gone save one calf, the Benjamin and idol of her heart. 

One night she heard a piteous baaing, and, seizing a 
broom, rushed to the now henless hen-house, in which she 
kept the calf, to find in it a full-grown panther attacking her 
pet. By this time the old lady had grown desperate, and 
seizing the broom, she proceeded to " lam " the wild beast 
with the handle, and with all her heart ; and the fiend of 
ferocity, appalled at her attack, fled. I saw the calf with the 
marks of the panther's claws, not yet quite healed ; I saw the 
broom ; and, lastly, I saw the old woman, the mother in 
Ishmael ; whose face -was a perfect guarantee of the truth of 
the story. One of us suggested that the old lady should have 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 311 

the calf's hide tanned and wear it as a trophy, like an Indian, 
which would have been a strange reversal of Shakespeare's 
application of it, or to 

" Hang a calf-skin on those recreant limbs." 

Then there came the great spring freshet in Elk River, 
which rose unusually high, fifty feet above its summer level. 
It had come to within an inch or two of my floor, and yet I 
went to bed and to sleep. By a miracle it rose no more, for 
I had a distinct conviction it would not, which greatly 
amazed everybody. But many were drowned all about us. 
The next day a man who professed bone-setting and doctor- 
ing, albeit not diplomaed, asked me to go with him and act 
as interpreter to a German patient who had a broken thigh. 
While felling a tree far away in the forest, it thundered down 
on him, and kept him down for two or three days till he Avas 
discovered. To get to him we went in a small canoe, and 
paddled ourselves with shingles or wooden tiles, used to cover 
roofs. On the way I saw a man on a roof fiddling ; only a bit 
of the roof was above water. He was waiting for deliver- 
ance. Many and strange indeed were all the scenes and inci- 
dents of that inundation, and marvellous the legends which 
were told of other freshets in the daj^s of yore. 

I never could learn to play cards. Destiny forbade it, 
and always stepped in promptly to stop all such proceedings. 
One night Sandford and friends sat down to teach me poker, 
when hang^ hang^ went a revolver outside, and a bullet buried 
itself in the door close by me. A riotous, evil-minded darkey, 
who attended to my washing, had got into a fight, and was 
forthwith conveyed to the Bull-pen, or military prison. I 
was afraid lest I might lose my shirts, and so " visited him " 
next day and found him in irons, but reading a newspaper at 
his ease. From him I learned the address of " the coloured 
lady " who had my underclothing. 

The Bull-pen was a picturesque place — a large log en- 
closure, full of strange inmates, such as wild guerillas in 



312 MEMOIRS. 

moccasins, grey-back Confederates and blue-coat Federals 
guilty of many a murder, arson, and much horse-stealing, 
desolate deserters, often deserving pity — the debris of a four 
years' war, the crumbs of the great loaf fallen to the dirt. 

Warm weather came on, and I sent to Philadelphia for a 
summer suit of clothes. It came, and it was of a light grey 
colour. At that time Oxford " dittos," or a suit imreil par- 
tout^ were unknown in West Virginia. I was dressed from 
head to foot in Confederate grey. Such a daring defiance of 
public opinion, coupled with my mysterious stealing into the 
rebel country, made me an object of awe and suspicion — a 
kind of Sir Grey Steal ! 

There was at that time in Charleston a German artillery 
regiment which really held the town — that is to say, the 
height which commanded it. I had become acquainted with 
its officers. All at once they gave me the cold shoulder and 
cut me. My friend Sandford was very intimate with them. 
One evening he asked their Colonel why they scorned me. 
The Colonel replied — 

" Pecause he's a tamned repel. Aferypody knows it." 

Sandford at once explained that I was even known at 
Washington as a good Union man, and had, moreover, trans- 
lated Heine, adding other details. 

" Gott verdammich — lieiss I " cried the Colonel in amaze- 
ment. " Is dot der Karl Leland vot dranslate de lleisehilder 9 
Herr je ! I hafe got dat very pook here on mein table ! 
Look at it. Bei Gott ! here's his name ! Dot is der crate 
Leland vot edit de Continental Magazine! Dot moost pe a 
fery deep man. Und I dink he vas a repel ! " 

The next morning early the Colonel sent his ambulance 
or army waggon to my hotel with a request that I would come 
and take breakfast with him. It was a bit of Heidelberg life 
over again. We punished Eheinwein and lager-beer in quan- 
tities. There were old German students among the officers, 
and I was received like a brother. 

At last Sandford and I determined to return to the East. 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 313 

There was in the hotel a coloured waiter named Harrison. 
He had been a slave, but " a gentleman's gentleman," was 
rather dignified, and allowed no ordinary white man to joke 
with him. On the evening before my departure I said to 
him — 

" Well, Harrison, I hope that you haven't quite so bad an 
opinion of me as the other people here seem to have." 

He manifested at once a really violent emotion. Dashing 
something to the ground, he cried — 

" Mr. Leland, you never did anything contrary to a gen- 
tleman. I always maintained it. Xow please tell me the 
truth. Is it true that you're a great friend of Jeff Davis ? " 

" Damn Jeff Davis ! " I replied. 

" And you ain't a major in the Confederate service ? " 

" I'm a clear-down Abolitionist, and was born one." 

" And you ain't had no goings on with the rebels up the 
river to bring back the Confederacy here ? " 

" Devil a dealing." 

And therewith I explained how it was that I went un- 
harmed up into the rebels' country, and great was the joy of 
Harrison, who, as I found, had taken my part valiantly against 
those who suspected me. 

There was a droll comedy the next day on board the 
steamboat on which I departed. A certain Mr. H., who had 
been a rebel and recanted at the eleventh hour and become 
a Federal official, requested everybody on board not to notice 
me. Sandford learned it all, and chuckled over it. But the 
captain and mate and crew were all still rebels at heart. 
Great was my amazement at being privately informed by the 
steward that the captain requested as a favour that I would 
sit by him at dinner and share a bottle of wine. I did so, 
and while I remained on board was treated as an honoured 
guest. 

And now I would here distinctly declare that, apart from 
my political principles, from which I never swerved, I always 
found the rebels— that is, Southern and Western men with 



314 MEMOIRS. 

whom I had had intimate dealings — without one exception 
personally the most congenial and agreeable people whom I 
had ever met. There was not to be found among them what 
in England is known as a prig. They were natural and gen- 
tlemanly, even doAvn to the poorest and most uneducated. 

One day Sam Fox came to me and asked me to use my 
influence with the Cannelton Company to get him employ- 
ment at their works. 

" Sam," I replied, " I can't do it. It is only three weeks 
now, when you were employed at another place, that you tried 
to stuff the overseer into the furnace, and if the men had not 
prevented, you would have burned him up alive." 

" Yes," replied Sam, " but he had called me a son 

of ." 

" Very good," I answered ; " and if he had called me tliat^ 
I should have done the same. But I don't think, if I had 
done it, I should ever have expected to be employed again on 
another furnace. You see, Samuel, my son, that these North- 
ern men have very queer notions — very^ 

Sam was quite convinced. 

At Cincinnati a trifling but droll incident occurred. I 
do not set myself up for a judge of wines, but I have natu- 
rally a delicate sense of smell or fiair^ though not the extraor- 
dinary degree in which my brother possessed it, who never 
drank wine at all. He was the first person who ever, in 
printed articles or in lectures, insisted that South New Jersey 
was suitable for wine-growing. At the hotel Sandford asked 
me if I could tell any wine by the taste. I replied No, but I 
would try ; so they gave me a glass of some kind, and I said 
that honestly I could only declare that I should say it was 
Portugal common country wine, but I must be wrong. Then 
Sandford showed the bottle, and the label declared it to be 
grown in Ohio. The next day he came to me and said, " I 
believe that after all you know a great deal about wine. I 
told the landlord what you said, and he laughed, and said, ' I 
had not the American wine which you called for, and so I 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 315 

gave you a cheap but unusual Portuguese wine.' " This wine 
is neither white nor red, and tastes like sherry and Burgundy 
mixed. 

At Cincinnati, Sandf ord proposed that we should return 
by way of Detroit and Niagara. I objected to the expense, 
but he, who knew every route and rate by heart, explained to 
me that, owing to the competition in railway rates, it would 
only cost me six shillings ($1.50) more, plus $2.50 (ten shil- 
lings) from New York to Philadelphia. So we departed. In 
Detroit I called on my cousin, Benjamin Stimson (the S. of 
" Two Years before the Mast"), and found him a prominent 
citizen. So, skirting along southern Canada, we got to Niag- 
ara, and thence to Albany and down the Hudson to New 
York, and so on to Philadelphia. 

It seems to me now that at this time all trace of my 
former life and self had vanished. I seemed to be only 
prompt to the saddle, canoe-paddle, revolver, steamboat, and 
railroad. My wife said that after this and other periods of 
Western travel I was always for three weeks as wild as an 
Indian, and so I most truly and unaffectedly was. I did not 
act in a foolish or disorderly manner at all, but Tennessee 
and Elk Eiver were in me. Robert Hunt and Sam Fox and 
many more had expressed their amazement at the amount 
of extremely familiar and congenial nature which they had 
found in me, and they were quite right. Sam and Goshorn 
declared that I was the only Northern man whom they had 
ever known who ever learned to paddle a dug-out correctly ; 
but as I was obliged to do this sometimes for fifteen hours 
a day nolens volens, it is not remarkable that I became an 
expert. 

As regards the real unaffected feeling of wildness born to 
savage nature, life, and association, it is absolutely as differ- 
ent from all civilised feeling whatever as bird from fish ; and 
it very rarely happens that an educated man ever knows what 
it is. "What there is of it in me which Indians recognise is, 
I believe, entirely due to hereditary endowment. 



316 MEMOIRS. 

" Znra Wald, zum Wald, steht mir mein Sinn.' 
So cinzig, ach ! so einzig bin. 
Dort lebt man freundlich, Icbt man froh, 
Und nirgends, nirgends lebt man so." 

It does not come from reading or culture — it comes of 
itself by nature, or not at all ; nor has it over-much to do 
with thought. Only in something like superstition can it 
find expression, but that must be childlike and sweet and 
sincere, and without the giggling with which such subjects 
are invariably received by ladies in society. 

I went with my wife and her mother and sister to pass 
some time at Bethlehem, in Pennsylvania, which we did very 
pleasantly at a country inn. It is a very interesting town, 
where a peculiar German dialect is generally spoken. There 
was a very respectable wealthy middle-aged lady, a Pennsyl- 
vanian by birth, who avoided meeting us at table because she 
could not speak English. And when I was introduced to 
her, I made matters worse by speaking to her naturally in 
broad South German, whereupon she informed me that she 
spoke ^oc/i-D outsell ! But I made myself popular among the 
natives with my German, and our landlord was immensely 
proud of me. I wasn't " one of dem city fellers dat shames 
demselfs of de Dutch," not I. " Vy, I dells you vot, mein 
Gott ! he's p7wud of it ! " 

I ended the summer at beautiful Lenox, in Massachusetts, 
in the charming country immortalised in " Elsie Venner " ; 
of which work, and my letter on it to Dr. Holmes, and my 
conversation with him thereanent, I might fill a chapter. 
But " let us not talk about them but pass on." I returned 
to Philadelphia and to my father's house, wdiere I remained 
one year. 

I had for a long time, at intervals, been at work on a book 
to be entitled the " Origin of American Popular Phrases." 
I had scissored from newspapers, collected from negro min- 
strels and Western rustics, and innumerable 'New England 
friends, as well as books and old songs and comic almanacs 



LIFE DURING THE CIVIL WAR. 3I7 

and the like, a vast amount of valuable material. This work, 
which had cost me altogether a full year's labour, had been 
accepted by a New York publisher, and was in the printer's 
hands. I never awaited anything with such painful anxiety 
as I did this publication, for I had never been in such straits 
nor needed money so much, and it seemed as if the more 
earnestly I sought for employment the more it evaded me. 
And then almost as soon as my manuscript was in the 
printer's hands his office was burned, and the work perished, 
for I had not kept a copy. 

It was a great loss, but from the instant when I heard of 
it to this day I never had five minutes' trouble over it, and 
more probably not one. I had done my very lest to make a 
good book and some money, and could do no more. When I 
was a very small boy I was deeply impressed with the story in 
the " Arabian Mghts " of the prisoner who knew that he was 
going to be set free because a rat had run away with his 
dinner. So I, at the age of seven, announced to my father 
that I believed that whenever a man had bad luck, good was 
sure to follow, which opinion he did not accept. And to this 
day I hold it, because, reckoning up the chances of life, it is 
true for most people. At any rate, I derived some comfort 
from the fact that the accident was reported in all the news- 
papers all over the Union. 

About the 1st of July, 1866, we left my father's house to 
go to Cape May, where we remained for two months. In 
September we went to a very good boarding-house in Phila- 
delphia, kept by Mrs. Sandgren. She possessed and showed 
me Tegner's original manuscript of "Anna and Axel." I 
confess that I never cared over-much for Tegner, and that I 
infinitely prefer the original Icelandic Saga of Frithiof to his 
sago-gruel imitation of strong soup. 



VI. 
LIFE ON THE PRESS. 

186G-18G9. 

I become managing editor of John W. Forney's Press — "Warwick the 
King-maker — The dead duck — A trip to Kansas in the old buffalo 
days — Miss Susan Blow, of St. Louis — The Iron Mountain of Mis- 
souri — A strange dream — Rattlesnakes — Kaw Indians — I am adopted 
into the tribe — Grand war-dance and ceremonies — Open-air lodg- 
ings — Prairie fires — In a dangerous country — Indian victims — H. 
M. Stanley — Lieutenant Hesselberger — I shoot a buffalo — Wild rid- 
ing — In a herd — Indian white men — Ringing for the carriage with 
a rifle — Brigham the driver — General and Mrs. Custer — Three thou- 
sand miles in a railway car — How *''Hans Breitmann's" ballads 
came to be published — The publisher thinks that he cannot sell 
more than a thousand of the book — I establish a weekly newspaper 
— Great success — Election rioting — Oratory and revolvers — How 
the meek and lowly Republicans revolvered the Democrats — The 
dead duck and what befell him who bore it — I make two thousand 
German votes by giving Forney a lesson in their language — Freiheit 
und Gleichheit — The Winnebago Indian chief — Horace Greeley — 
Maretzek the Bohemian — Fanny Janauschek and the Czech lan- 
guage — A narrow escape from death on the Switchback — Death of 
my father — Another Western railway excursion — A quaint old 
darkey — Chicago — I threaten to raise the rent — General influence 
of Chicago — St. Paul, Minnesota — A seven days' journey through 
the wilderness — The Canadian — Smudges — Indians — A foot jour- 
ney through the woods — Indian pack-bearers — Mayor Stewart— I 
rifle a grave of silver ornaments — Isle Royale — My brother, Henry 
Perry Leland — The press — John Forney carries Grant's election, 
and declares that I really did the work — The weekly press and 
George Francis Train — Grant's appointments — My sixth introduc- 
tion to the General — Garibaldi's dagger. 

"We had not lived at Mrs. Sandgren's more than a week 
when George Boker, knowing my need, spoke to Colonel 



LIFE ON THE PRESS. 319 

John Forney, who was at that time not only Secretary of the 
Senate of the United States, but the proprietor of the Chron- 
icle newspaper in Washington, of the Press in Philadelphia, 
" both daily," as the Colonel once said, which very simple 
and commonplace expression became a popular by- word. 
Colonel Forney wanted a managing editor for the Press, and, 
as I found in due time, not so much a man of enterprise and 
a leader — that he supplied — nor yet one to practically run 
the journal — that his son John, a young man of eighteen, sup- 
plied — so much as a steady, trustworthy, honest pivot on which 
the compass could turn during his absences — and that / sup- 
plied. I must, to explain the situation, add gently that 
John, who could not help it considering his experiences, 
was, to put it mildly, a little irregular, rendering a steady 
manager absolutely necessary. It was a great pity, for John 
the junior was extremely clever as a practical managing edi- 
tor, remembering everything, and knowing — what I never 
did or could — all the little tricks, games, and wiles of all the 
reporters and others employed. 

Colonel Forney was such a remarkable character, and had 
such a great influence for many years in American politics, 
that as I had a great deal to do with him — very much more 
than was generally known — at a time when he struck his 
greatest political cov]?, in which, as he said, I greatly aided 
him, I will here dwell on him a space. Before I knew him 
I called him Warwick the King-maker, for it was generally 
admitted that it was to his intense hatred of Buchanan, 
added to his speech-making, editing, and tremendously vig- 
orous and not always over-scrupulous intriguing, that " Ten- 
cent Jimmy " owed his defeat. At this time, in all presiden- 
tial elections, Pennsylvania turned the scale, and John For- 
ney could and did turn Pennsylvania like a Titan ; and he 
frankly admitted that he owed the success of his last turn to 
me, as I shall in time relate. 

Forney's antipathies were always remarkably well placed. 
He hated Buchanan; also, for certain personal reasons, he 



320 MEMOIRS. 

hated Simon Cameron ; and finally it came to pass that he 
hated Andrew Johnson with a hatred of twenty-four carats — 
an aquafortis detestation — and for a most singular cause. 

One night when this " President by the pistol, and small- 
est potato in the American garden of liberty," was making 
one of his ribald speeches, after having laid out Horace Gree- 
ley, some one in the crowd cried — 

" Now give us Jolin Forney ! " 

With an air of infinite contempt the President ex- 
claimed — 

" I don't waste my powder on dead ducks." 

He had better have left that word unsaid, for it ruined 
him. It woke Colonel John Forney up to the very highest 
pitch of his fighting " Injun," or, as they say in Pennsylva- 
nia, his " Dutch." He had always been to that hour a genial 
man, like most politicians, a little too much given to the so- 
cial glass. But from that date of the dead duck he became 
" total abstinence," and concentrated all his faculties and 
found all his excitement in vengeance hot and strong, with- 
out a grain of sugar. In which I gladly sympathised and 
aided, for I detested Johnson as a renegade Copperhead, or 
rather venomous toad to the South, who wished with all his 
soul to undo Lincoln's work and bring in the Confederacy. 
And I believe, on my life and soul, that if John Forney had 
not defeated him, we should have had such disasters as are 
now inconceivable, the least of them being a renewal of the 
war. Johnson had renegaded from the Confederacy because, 
being only a tailor, he had ranked as a " low white," or some- 
thing despised even by " quality " negroes. The Southern 
aristocracy humbugged him by promising that if he would 
betray the Union he should be regarded as one of themselves, 
by which very shallow cheat he was — as a snob would be — 
easily caught, and in due time cast off. 

I had been but a few weeks on the Press, and all was 
going on well, when one morning the Colonel abruptly asked 
me if I could start in the morning for Fort Riley, of which 



LIFE ON THE PHESS. 321 

all I knew was that it constituted an extreme frontier station 
in Kansas. There was to be a Kansas Pacific railway laid 
out, and a large party of railroad men intended to go as far 
as the last surveyor's camp. Of course, a few editors had 
been invited to write up the road, and these in turn sent 
some one in their place. I knew at once that I should have 
something like the last year's wild life over again, and I was 
delighted. I borrowed John Forney's revolver, provided an 
agate-point and "manifold paper" for duplicate letters to 
our " two papers, both daily," and at the appointed hour was 
at the railway station. There had been provided for us the 
director's car, a very large and extremely comfortable vehi- 
cle, with abundance of velvet " settees " or divan sofas, with 
an immense stock of lobster-salad, cold croquettes, game, with 
" wines of every fineness," and excellent waiters. The excur- 
sion, indeed, cost £1,000 ; but it was made to pay, and that 
to great profit. 

We were all a very genial, congenial party of easy-going 
geniuses. There was Hassard, the " day editor " of the Neio 
York Tribune^ who had been with me on the Cycloi^cedia^ and 
to whom I was much attached, for he was a gentlemanly 
scholar, and withal had seen enough of life on the Tribune 
to hold his own with any man ; and Captain William Colton, 
who had been with me in Tennessee ; Eobert Lamborn, who 
had studied science in Germany, and was now a railroad man, 
and many more who are recorded in my pamphlet, " Three 
Thousand Miles in a Eailway Car," and my old associate, 
Caspar Souder, of the Bulletin. This excursion was destined, 
in connection with this pamphlet, to have a marvellous effect 
on my future life. 

In every town where we paused — and our pauses were fre- 
quent, as we travelled very much on the " go-as-you-please " 
plan — we were received by the authorities with honour and 
speeches and invited to dinners or drinks. Our conductors 
were courtesy itself. One afternoon one of them on a rough 
bit of road said, " Gentlemen, whenever you wish to open a 



322 MEMOIRS. 

bottle of champagne, please to pull the cord and stop the 
train. You can then drink without spilling your wine." 

So we went to Chicago and St. Louis, where we were enter- 
tained by Mr. Blow, and where I became acquainted with his 
daughter Susan. She was then a beautiful blonde, and, as I 
soon found, very intelligent and cultured. She was long 
years afterwards busy in founding philanthropic schools in 
St. Petersburg, Russia, when I was there — a singularly noble 
woman. However, at this time neither of us dreamed of the 
school-keeping which we were to experience in later years. 
At this soiree, and indeed for the excursion the next day, we 
had as a guest Mr. AValter, of the London Times. 

The next day we had a special train and an excursion of 
ladies and gentlemen to visit the marvellous Knob or Iron 
Mountain. This is an immense conical hill with a deep sur- 
rounding dale, beyond which rise other hills all of nearly 
solid iron. Eeturning that evening in the train, a very 
strange event took place. There was with us a genial, pleas- 
ant, larky young fellow, one of the famous family of the 
MacCooks. When the war came on he was at college — went 
into the army, fought hard — rose to be captain, and then 
after the peace went back to the college and finished his 
studies. This was the "event." We were telling stories of 
dreams ; when it came to my turn I said : — 

" In 1860 I had never been in Ohio, nor did I know any- 
thing about it. One night — it was at Reading, Pennsylvania 
— I fell asleep. I dreamed that I wolce up, rose from the bed, 
went to the match-box, struck a light, and while it burned 
observed the room, which was just the same as when I had 
retired. The match went out. I lit another, when what was 
my amazement to observe that everything in the room had 
changed its colour to a rich hrown ! Looking about me, I 
saw on a kind of etagere scores of half-burned candles in 
candlesticks, as if there had been a ball. I lighted nearly all 
of them. Hearing a sound as of sweeping and the knocking 
of a broom-handle without, I went into the next room, which 



LIFE ON THE PRESS. 323 

was the hall where the dance had been held. A very stupid 
fellow was sweeping it out. I asked him where I was. He 
could not reply intelligently. There came into the hall a 
bustling, pleasant woman, rather small, who I saw at a glance 
was the housekeeper. She said something to the man as to 
the room's being dark. I remarked that there was light 
enough in my room, for I had lit all the candles. She cried, 
laughing, ' What extravagance ! ' I answered, ' My dear little 
woman, what does a candle or two signify to you? Kow 
please tell me where I am. Last night I went to sleep in 
Beading, Pennsylvania. Where am I now?' She replied 
(and of this word I was not sure), 'In Columbus, Ohio.' I 
asked if there was any prominent man in the place who was 
acquainted with Philadelphia, and who might aid me to re- 
turn. She reflected, and said that Judge B^ier and his two 
daughters (of whom I had never heard) had just returned 
from the East." 

Here MacCook interrupted me eagerly : " You were not 
in Columbus, but in Dayton, Ohio. And it was not Judge 
Duer, but Judge Duey, with his two daughters, who was that 
summer in the East." I went on : — 

" I left the room and went into the hall. I came to the 
front door. Far down below me I saw a winding river and 
a steamboat." 

Here MacCook spoke again : " That was surely Dayton. 
I know the house and the view. But it could not have been 
Columbus." I went on : — 

" I went downstairs too far by mistake into the cellar. 
There I found a man sawing wood. I went up again. [Pray 
observe that a year after, when I went West, this very incident 
occurred one morning in Cincinnati, Ohio.] I found in the 
bar-room three respectable-looking men. I told them my 
story. One said to the others, ' He is always the same old 
fellow ! ' I stared at him in amazement. He held out one 
hand and moved the other as if fiddling. Monotonous 
creaking sounds followed, and I gradually awoke. The same 



324 MEMOIRS. 

sounds continued, but tliey were caused by the grasshoppers 
and tree-toads, who pipe monotonously all night long in 
America." 

Nothing ever came of the dream, but it all occurred ex- 
actly as I describe it. I have had several quite as strange. 
Immediately after I had finished my narration, some one, al- 
luding to our party, asked if there was any one present who 
could sing " Hans Breitmann's Barty," and I astonished them 
not a little by proclaiming that I was the author, and by sing- 
ing it. 

We went on to Leavenworth, where we had a dinner at 
the hotel which was worthy of Paris. We had, for example, 
prairie pullets or half-grown grouse, wild turkeys and tender 
venison. Thence to Fort Eiley, and so on in waggons to the 
last surveyor's camp. I forget where it was on the route that 
we stopped over-night at a fort, where I found some old 
friends and made new ones. A young officer — Lieutenant 
Brown, I think — gave me a bed in his cabin. His ceiling was 
made of canvas. For weeks he had heard a great rattlesnake 
moving about on it. One day he had made a hole in the ceil- 
ing and put into it a great fierce tom-cat. The cat " went 
for " the snake and there was an awful row. After a time 
the cat came out looking like a devil with every hair on end, 
made straight for the prairie, and was never heard of again. 
Neither was the snake. They had finished one another. On 
another occasion, when sitting in a similar cabin, my gentle 
hostess, an officer's wife, whom I had known a few years be- 
fore as a beauty in society, remarked that she had two large 
rattlesnakes in her ceiling, and that if we would be silent we 
might hear them crawling about. They could not be taken 
out without rebuilding the roof. 

Captain Colton had just recovered from a very bad attack 
of fever and ague, and, being young, had the enormous appe- 
tite which follows weeks of quinine. I saw him this day eat 
a full meal of beefsteaks, and then immediately after devour 
another, at Brown's, of buffalo-meat. The air of the Plains 



LIFE ON THE PRESS. 325 

causes incredible hunger. We all played a good knife and 
fork. 

About twiliglit-tide there came in a very gentlemanly 
Catholic priest. I was told that he was a roving missionary. 
He led a charmed life, for he went to visit the wildest tribes, 
and was everywhere respected. I conversed with him in 
French. After a while he spread his blanket, lay down on 
the floor and slept till morning, when he read his prayers and 
departed. 

The next day the fort square was full of Kaw Indians, all 
in savage array, about to depart for their autumnal buffalo- 
hunt. I met one venerable heathen with his wife and babe, 
with whom I made genial acquaintance. I asked the wife 
the name for a whip; she rej^lied E^meergasliee ; a pony was 
slioonga, the nose Az;i, and a woman sliwimy -shindy ! I 
bought his whip for a dollar. The squaw generously offered 
to throw in the baby, which I declined, and we all laughed 
and parted. 

I went to the camp, and there the whole party, seeing my 
curious whip, went at the Kaws to buy theirs. Bank-bills 
were our only currency then, and the Indians knew there were 
such things as counterfeits. They consulted together, eyed 
us carefully, and then every man as he received his dollar 
brought it to me for approval. By chance I knew the Pawnee 
word for " good " ( WasJiitaw), and they also knew it. Then 
came a strange wild scene. I spoke to the chief, and point- 
ing to my whip said, " B^jneergashee,''^ and indicating a woman 
and a pony, repeated, " SMmmy-shinclg, sJioonga-hin,'''' inti- 
mating that its use was to chastise women and ponies by hit- 
ting them on the nose. Great was the amazement and delight 
of the Kaws, who roared with laughter, and their chief curi- 
ously inquired, ^'You Kaw?" To which I replied, " 0, 
nitchee, me Kaw, tvasJiitd good Injun me." He at once em- 
braced me with frantic joy, as did the others, to the great 
amazement of my friends. A wild circular dance was at once 
improvised to celebrate my reception into the tribe ; at which 
15 



326 MEMOIRS. 

our driver Brigham dryly remarked that he didn't wonder 
they were glad to get me, for I was the first Injun ever seen 
in that tribe with a whole shirt on him. This was the order 
of proceedings : — I stood in the centre and sang wildly the 
following song, which was a great favourite with our party, 
and all joining in the chorus : — 

1 slew the chief of the Muscolgee ; 
I burnt his squaw at the blasted tree I 
By the hind-legs I tied up the cur, 
He had no time to fondle on her. 

Chorus. 
Hoo ! hoo ! hoo ! the Muscolgee ! 
Wah, wah, wah ! the blasted tree ! 

A faggot from the blasted tree 
Fired the lodge of the Muscolgee ; 
His sinews served to string my bow 
When bent to lay his brethren low. 

Cliorus. 
Hoo ! hoo ! hoo ! the Muscolgee ! 
Wah, wah, wah ! the blasted tree ! 

I stripped his skull all naked and bare, 
And here's his skull with a tuft of hair I 
His heart is in the eagle's maw, 
His bloody bones the wolf doth gnaw. 

Chorus. 
Hoo ! hoo ! hoo ! the Muscolgee ! 
Wah, wah, wah ! the blasted tree ! 

The Indians yelled and drummed at the Eeception Dance. 
" Now you good Kaw — Good Injun you be — all same me," 
said the chief. Hassard and Lamborn cracked time with 
their whips, and, in short, we made a grand circular row ; truly 
it was a wondrous striking scene ! From that day I was called 
the Kaw chief, even by Hassard in his letters to the Tribune.^ 
in which he mentioned that in scenes of excitement I rode 
and whooped like a savage. It may be so — / never noticed 
it ; perhaps he exaggerated, but I must admit that I do like 



LIFE ON THE PRESS. 327 

Indians, and they like me. We took ambulances or strong 
covered army-waggons and pushed on. We were now well 
out on the plains. All day long we passed prairie-dog villages 
and saw antelopes bounding afar. At night we stopped at 
the hotel Alia Fresca^ or slept in the open air. It was per- 
fectly delightful, though in November. Far in the distance 
many prairie fires stretched like miles of blazing serpents over 
the distance. I thought of the innumerable camp-fires be- 
fore the battle of Gettysburg, and determined that the two 
were among the most wonderful sights of my life. We rose 
very early in the morning, by grey light, and after a drink of 
whisky pushed on. I may here mention that from 1863 for 
six years I very rarely indeed tasted any intoxicant. 

So we went on till we reached the last surveyor's camp. 
We had not been there half an hour before a man came in 
declaring that he had just saved his scalp, having seen a 
party of Apaches in their war-paint, but luckily hid himself 
before they discovered him. It was evident that we had 
now got beyond civilisation. Already, on the way, we had 
seen ranches which had been recently burned by the Indians, 
who had killed their inmates. One man, observing my Kaw 
whip, casually remarked that as I was fond of curiosities he 
was sorry that he had not kept six arrows which he had 
lately pulled out of a man whom he had found lying dead in 
the road, and who had just been shot by the Indians. 

Within this same hour after our arrival there came in a 
Lieutenant Hesselberger, bringing with him a Mrs. Box and 
her two daughters, one about sixteen and the other twelve. 
The Indians had on the Texas frontier murdered and scalped 
her husband before her eyes, burned their home, and carried 
the three into captivity, where for six months they were daily 
subjected to such mcrediUe outrages and cruelty that it was 
simply a miracle that they survived. As it was, they looked 
exactly like corpses. Lieutenant Hesselberger, with bravery 
beyond belief, having heard of these captives, went alone to 
the Indians to ransom them. Firstly, they fired guns unex- 



328 MEMOIRS. 

pectedly close to his head, and finding that he did not start, 
brought out the captives and subjected them to the extremes 
of gross abuse before his eyes, and repeatedly knocked them 
down with clubs, all of which he affected to disregard. At 
last the price was agreed on and he took them away. 

In after years, when I described all this in London to 
Stanley, the African explorer, he said, " Strange ! I, too, 
was there that very day, and saw those women, and wrote an 
account of it to the Neiu YorJc Herald.'''' I daresay that I 
met and talked to him at the time among those whom we 
saw. 

Not far from our camp there was a large and well-popu- 
lated beaver-dam, which I studied with great interest. It 
was more like a well regulated town than is many a western 
mining village. I do not wonder that Indians regard Quah- 
leet^ the beaver, as a human being in disguise. N. B. — The 
beaver always, when he cuts a stick, sharpens it like a lead- 
pencil — which indicates an artistic nature. 

It was now resolved that a number of our party should 
go into the Smoky Hill country to attend a very great In- 
dian council, while the rest returned home. So I joined the 
adventurers. The meeting was not held, for I believe the 
Indians went to war. But we rode on. One morning I saw 
afar a few black specks, and thought they were cattle. And 
so they were, but the free cattle of the plains, or buffaloes. 
That evening, as we were out of meat. Col ton and others 
went out to hunt them, and had a fine chase, but got 
nothing. 

The next morning Colton kindly gave me his chance — 
that is, he resigned to me a splendid black horse used to the 
business — and most of us went to the field. After a while, or 
a four miles' run, we came up with a number. There was a 
fine cow singled out and shot at, and I succeeded in putting 
a ball in just behind the shoulder. Among us all she became 
beef, and an expert hunter with us, whose business it was to 
supply the camp with meat, skinned and butchered her and 



LIFE ON THE PRESS. 



329 



cooked a meal for us on the spot. The beef was deliciously 
tender and well flavoured. 

N"ow, before this cooking, in the excitement of the chase, 
I had ridden on like an Indian, as Hassard said in his letter, 
whooping like one all alone after the buffalo, and in my joy 
forgot to shake the spent cartridge out of my Spenser seven- 
shooter carbine. All at once I found myself right in the 
herd, close by a monstrous bull, whose height at the instant 
when he turned on me to gore me seemed to be about a hun- 
dred and fifty feet. But my horse was used to this, and 
swerved with incredible tact and swiftness, while I held on. 
I then had a perfectly close shot, not six feet off, under the 
shoulder, and I raised the carbine and pulled trigger, when 
it — ticked ! I had forgotten the dead cartridge, and was not 
used to th« arm which I carried. I think that I swore, and 
if I did not I am sorry for it. Before I could arrange my 
charge the buffaloes v/ere far away. 

However, we had got our cow, and that was more than 
we really needed. At any rate, I had shot a buffalo and had 




Cf^jll^ll^l^ 






a stupendous run. And here I must mention that while 
racing and whooping, I executed the most insanely foolish 
thing I ever did in all my life, which astonished the hunter 
and all present to the utmost. I was at the top of a declivity 



330 MEMOIRS. 

from which there descended a flight of natural stairs of rock, 
but every one very broad, like the above sketch. 

And being inspired by the devil, and my horse not object- 
ing at all, I clattered down over it at full speed a la Putnam. 
I have heard that Indians do this very boldly, declaring that 
it is perfectly safe if the rider is not afraid, and I am quite 
sure that mine must have been an Indian horse. I hope that 
no one will think that I have put forward or made too much 
of these trifling boyish tricks of recklessness. They are of 
daily occurrence in the Wild West among men who like ex- 
citement, and had Eobert Hunt been among us there would 
have been fun indeed. 

So we turned homewards, for the Indian Conference had 
proved a failure. We had for our driver a man named Brig- 
ham, to whom I had taken a great liking. He had lived as 
a trader among the wildest Indians, spoke Spanish fluently, 
and knew the whole Western frontier like his pocket. The 
day after we had seen Mrs. Box come in, I was praising the 
braveness of Lieutenant Hesselberger in venturing to rescue 
her. 

"It isn't all bravery at all," said Brigham. "He's brave 
as a panther, but there's more in it than that. There is 
about one man in a hundred, and not more, who can go 
among the most God-forsaken devils of Injuns and never 
get hurt. The Injuns take to them at a glance and love 'em. 
Fin such a man, and I've proved it often enough, God 
knows ! Lieutenant Hesselberger is one, and," he added 
abruptly, " Mr. Leland, you'' re another." 

" What makes you think so ? " I said, greatly surprised. 

" 'Cause I've watched you. You've got Injun ways that 
you don't know of. Didn't I notice the other day, when the 
gentlemen were buying the whips from the Kaws, that every 
Injun took a squint, and then came straight to you ? Why 
didn't they go to one of the other gentlemen? Because 
they've got an instinct like a dog for their friends, and for 
such as lue.''^ 



LIFE ON THE PRESS. 331 

We were coming to Fort Harker. I forget how it all 
came about, but we found ourselves afoot, with a mile or two 
to walk, carrying our guns, carpet-bags, and petites hagages^ 
while about fifty yards ahead or more there was Brigham 
driving on merrily to the fort, under the imjoression that we 
had secured other conveyance. 

Oa23tain Colton fired his carbine. It made about as much 
noise as a percussion-cap, and the wind was from Brigham 
toward us. Carried away by an impulse, I caught Colonel 
Lamborn's light rifle out of his hand. 

" Great God ! " he cried, '^ you don't mean to shoot at 
him?" 

" If you'll insure the mules," I said, " I will the driver." 
My calculation was to send a bullet so near to Brigham that 
he could hear it whizz, but not to touch him. It was not so 
dangerous as the shot I had fired over Sam Fox, and the 
" s]3irit " was on me ! 

But I did not know that in the covered waggon sat Has- 
sard talking with Brigham, their faces being, as Hassard de- 
clared, just about six inches apart. I fired, and the bullet 
passed just between their noses ! 

Hassard heard the whizz, and cried, " What's that ? " 

" Injuns^ by God ! " roared Brigham, forgetting that we 
had left the Indian countrv two days behind us. " Lie down 
in the waggon while I drive." And drive he did, till out of 
gunshot, and then putting his face out, turned around, and 
gave in full desperate cry the taunting war-whoop of the 
Cheyennes. It was a beautiful sight that of Brigham's 
broad red face wild with rage — and his great gold earrings 
and Mexican sombrero — turning round the waggon at us in 
defiance like Marmion ! 

But when he realised that tve had fired at him, just 

as a pack of d d Apaches might have done, for fun, 

to stop the waggon, his expression became one of utter 
bewilderment. As I came up I thought there might be 
a shindy. 



332 MEMOIRS. 

" Brigliam," I said in Spanish, " es la ma7io o el navajo ? " 
[Is it to be hand, or knife ?] 

Brigham was proud of his Spanish ; it was his elegant 
accomplishment, and this was a good scene. Grasj)ing my 
hand cordially, he said, " La ma?io.^^ Like a true frontiers- 
man, he felt in a minute the grandeur of the joke. There 
was, if I may so vulgarly express myself, an Indian-itity in 
it which appealed to his deepest feelings. There was a si- 
lence for several minutes, which he broke by exclaiming — 

" I've driven waggons now this twelve years on the fron- 
tier, but I never heard before of tryin' to stop the waggon by 
shootin' at the driver." 

There was another long silent pause, when he resumed — 

" I wish to God there was a gulch (ravine) between here 
and the fort ! I'd upset this crowd into it d d quick ! " 

That evening I took leave of Brigham. I drank healths 
with him in whisky, and shook hands, and said — 

" I did a very foolish and reckless thing to-day, Brigham, 
when I shot at you, and I am sorry for it, and I beg your 
pardon. Here is a dagger which I have had for twenty-five 
years. I carried it all over Europe. I have nothing better 
to give you ; please take it. And when you stick a Greaser 
(Mexican) with it, as I expect you will do some day, then 
think of me." 

The tears rose to his eyes, and he departed. I never met 
him again, but " well I wot " he ever had kindly remem- 
brance of me. We were to be guests of General Custer at 
the fort, and I was rather shy of meeting the castellan after 
firing at his driver ! But he greeted me with a hearty burst 
of laughter, and said — 

" Mr. Leland, you have the most original way of ringing 
a bell when you want to call a carriage that I ever heard 

of." 

As for TIassard, when he witnessed my parting with Brig- 
ham, he said — 

*' This is all mighty fine ! daggers and whisky, and all 



LIFE ON THE PRESS. 333 

kinds of beautiful things flying around for Brigliam, but 
what am / to have ? " 

" And what dost thou expect, son Hassard ? " I replied. 

Holding out both his hands, he replied — 

" Much tobacco ! much tobacco ! " 

This was in allusion to a story told us by Lieutenant 
Brown. Not long before, the Lieutenant, seeing, as he 
thought, a buffalo, had fired at it. But the buffalo turned 
out to be an Indian on a pony ; and the Indian riding fierce- 
ly at the Lieutenant, cried aloud for indemnity or the 
" blood-fine " in the words, " Much tobacco ! " And so I 
stood cigars. 

Life is worth living for — or it would be — if it abounded 
more in such types as Mrs. General Custer and her husband. 
There was a bright and joyous chivalry in that man, and a 
noble refinement mingled with constant gaiety in the wife, 
such as I fear is passing from the earth. Her books have 
shown that she was a woman of true culture, and that she 
came by it easily, as he did, and that out of a little they 
could make more than most do from a life of mere study. I 
fear that there will come a time when such books as hers 
will be the only evidences that there were ever such people — 
so fearless, so familiar with every form of danger, privation, 
and trial, and yet joyous and even reckless of it all. Good 
Southern blood and "Western experiences had made them 
free of petty troubles. The Indians got his scalp at last, and 
with him went one of the noblest men whom America ever 
brought forth.* 

That evening they sent for a Bavarian-Tyroler soldier, 
who played beautifully on the cithern. As I listened to the 
Joclel-lieder airs I seemed to be asrain in his native land. It 
was a pleasure to me to hear from him the familiar dialect. 

* " Custer was the life and soul of the greatest hand-to-hand victory 
ever gained over the Indians of the Plains — except Patsy Connor's Bear 
River Fight." — Tlie Masked Ve7ms, by Richard Henry Savage. 



334 MEMOIRS. 

At St. Louis we were very kindly entertained in several 
distinguished houses. At one they gave us some excellent 
Ehine wine. 

" What do you think of this ? " said Hassard, who was a 
good Latinist. 

I replied, " Vinum Ehenense decus et gloria mense." 

In the next we had Moselle wine. " And what of this ? " 

I answered, " Vinum Moslanum f uit omne tempore sa- 
num." 

And here I would say that every memory which I have of 
Missouri (and there are more by far than this book indi- 
cates), as of Missourians, is extremely pleasant. The State 
is very beautiful, and I have found among my friends there 
born such culture and kindness and genial hospitality as I 
have never seen surpassed. To the names of Mary A. Owen,* 
Blow, Mark Twain, and the Choteaus I could add many 
more. 

So we jogged on homeward. I resumed my work. I 
had written out all the details of our trip in letters to the 
Press. They had excited attention. The Pennsylvania 
Railroad Company suggested that they should be published 
in a pamphlet. I did so, and called it " Three Thousand 
Miles in a Eailroad Oar." They offered to pay me a very 
good sum for my trouble in so doing. I declined it, because 
I felt that I had been amply paid by the pleasure which I 
had derived from the journey. But I received grateful rec- 
ognition subsequently in another form. The pamphlet was 
most singular of its kind. It was a full report of all the statis- 
tics and vast advantages of the Kansas Pacific Road. It con- 
tained very valuable facts and figures ; and it was all served 
up with jokes, songs, buffalo-hunting, Indians, and Brigham. 
It was a marvellous farrago, and it " took." It was sent to 
every member of Oongress and " every other man." 

* Miss Owen is well known to all folk-lorists as the first living au- 
thority on Voodoo, 



LIFE ON THE PRESS. 335 

Before it appeared, a friend of mine named Eingwalt, 
who was both a literary man and owner of a printing-oflfice, 
offered me $200 if I would secure him the printing of it. I 
said that I would not take the money, but that I would get 
him the printing, which I easily did ; but being a very honour- 
able man, he was led to discharge the obligation. One day 
he said to me, " Why don't you publish your 'Breitmann 
Ballads ? ' Everybody is quoting them now." I replied, 
*' There is not a publisher in America who would accept 
them." And I was quite right, for there was not. He an- 
swered, " I will print them for you. I accepted the offer, 
but when they were set up an idea occurred to me by which 
I could save my friend his expenses. I went to a publisher 
named T. B. Peterson, who said effectively this — " The book 
will not sell more than a thousand copies. There will be 
about a thousand people who will buy it, even for fifty cents, 
so I shall charge that, though it would be, as books go, only 
as a twenty-five cent work." He took it and paid my friend 
for the composition. I was not to receive any money or share 
in the profits till all the expenses had been paid. 

Mr. Peterson immediately sold 2,000 — 4,000 — I know not 
how many thousands — at fifty cents a copy. It was repub- 
lished in Canada and Australia, to my loss. An American 
publisher who owned a magazine asked me, through his edi- 
tor, to write for it a long Breitmann poem. I did so, mak- 
ing, however, an explicit verbal arrangement that it slioidd 
not he rejniMisliecl as a hooh. It was, however, immediately 
republished as such, with a title to the effect that it was the 
" Breitmann Ballads." I appealed to the editor, and it was 
withdrawn, but I know not how many were issued, to my loss. 

I had transferred the whole right of publication in Eng- 
land to my friend Kicolas Trlibner, whom I had met when 
he had visited America, and I wrote specially for his edition 
certain poems. John " Camden " Hotten wrote to me mod- 
estly asking me to give him the sole right to republish the 
work. He said, " I hardly know what to say about the price. 



336 MEMOIRS. 

Suppose we say ten pounds ! " I replied, " Sir, I have given 
the whole right of publication to Mr. Triibner, and I would 
not take it from him for ten thousand pounds." Hotten at 
once published an edition which was a curiosity of ignorance 
and folly. There was a blunder on an average to every page. 
He had annotated it ! He explained that Knasterdart meant 
" a nasty fellow,' ' and that the French garce was gare, " a 
railway station ! " Triibner had sold 5,000 copies before this 
precious affair appeared. After Hotten's death the British 
public were informed in an obituary that he had ^^ first in- 
troduced me " to their knowledge ! 

Hans Breitmann became a type. I never heard of but 
one German who ever reviled the book, and that was a Demo- 
cratic editor in Philadelphia. But the Germans themselves 
recognised that the pen which poked fun at them was no 
poisoned stiletto. Whenever there was a grand German pro- 
cession, Hans was in it — the indomitable old Degen hung 
with loot — and he appeared in every fancy ball. Nor were 
the Confederates offended. One of the most genial, search- 
ing, and erudite reviews of the work, which appeared in a 
Southern magazine (De Bow's), declared that I had truly 
written the Hudibras of the Civil War. What struck this 
writer most was the fact that I had opened a neio field of 
humour. And here he was quite right. With the exception 
of Dan Eice's circus song of " Der goot oldt Sherman shen- 
tleman," and a rather flat parody of " Jessie, the Flower of 
Dumblane," I had never seen or heard of any specimen of 
Anglo-German poetry. To be merely original in language is 
not to excel in everything — a fact very generally ignored — 
else my Pidgin-English ballads would take precedence of 
Tennyson's poems ! On the other hand, very great poets 
have often not made a new/orm. The Yankee type, both 
as regards spirit and language, had become completely com- 
mon and familiar in prose and poetry, before Lowell revived 
it in the clever Bigloiu Papers. Bret Harte's " Heathen 
Chinee," and several other poems, are, however, both original 



LIFE ON THE PRESS. 337 

and admirable. Whatever tlie merits or demerits of mine 
were — and it was years ere I ever gave them a thought — the 
public, which is alv/ays eager for something new, took to 
them at once. 

I say that for years I never gave them a thought. All of 
the principal poems except the " Barty " and " Breitmann as 
a Politician," were merely written to fill up letters to 0. A. 
Bristed, of New York, and I kept no copies of them — in fact, 
utterly /or_^o^ them. Weingeist was first written in a letter 
to a sister of Captain Colton, with the remark that it was 
easier to write such a ballad than any prose. But Bristed 
published them a mon insit in a sporting paper. Years after 
I learned that I published one called " Breitmann's Sermon " 
in Leslie's Magazine. This I have never recovered. If I 
write so much about these poems now, I certainly was not 
vain of them when written. The public found them out long 
before I did, and it is not very often that it gets ahead of a 
poet in appreciating his own works. 

However, I was " awful busy " in those days. I had 
hardly begun on the Press ere I found that it had a weekly 
paper, made up from the daily type transferred, which only 
just paid its expenses. Secondly, I discovered that there was 
not a soul on the staff except myself who had had any ex- 
perience of weekly full editing. I at once made out a sched- 
nle, showing that by collecting and grouj)ing agricultural 
and industrial items, putting in two or three columns of 
original matter, and bringing in a story to go through the 
daily first, the weekly could be vastly improved at very little 
expense. 

Colonel Forney admired the scheme, but asked " who was 
to carry it out." I replied that I would. He remonstrated, 
very kindly, nrging that I had all I could do as it was. I 
answered, " Colonel Forney, this is not a matter of time, but 
method. There is always time for the man who knows how 
to lay it out." So I got up a very nice paper. But for a very 
long time I could not get an agent to solicit advertisements 



338 MEMOIRS. 

who knew the business. The weekly paid its expenses and 
nothing more. But one day there came to me a young man 
named M. T. Wolf. He was of Pennsylvania German stock. 
He had lost a small fortune in the patent medicine business 
and wanted employment badly. I suggested that, until some- 
thing else could be found, he should try his hand at collect- 
ing " advers." 

Now, be it observed, as Mozart was born to music, and 
some men have a powerful instinct to study medicine, and 
others are so unnatural as to take to mathematics. Wolf had 
a grand undeveloped genius beyond all belief for collecting 
advertisements. He had tried many pursuits and failed, but 
the first week he went into this business he brought in 1200 
(£40), which gave him forty dollars, and he never afterwards 
fell below it, but often rose above. " Advers." for him meant 
not adversity. It was very characteristic of Colonel Forne}^, 
who was too much absorbed in politics to attend much to 
business, that long after the Weekly Press was yielding him 
$10,000 a year clear ])ro fit ^ he said to me one day, "Mr. Le- 
land, you must not be discouraged as to the weekly ; the 
clerks tell me in the office that it meets its expeiises I " 

There v»^as abundance of life and incident on the news- 
paper in those days, especially during election times in the 
autumn. I have known fights, night after night, to be going 
on in the street below, at the corner of Seventh and Chest- 
nut, between Kepublicans and Democrats, with revolver shots 
and flashes at the rate of fifty to a second, when I was liter- 
ally so occupied with pressing telegrams that I could not look 
out to see the fun. One night, however, when there were 
death-shots falling thick and fast, I saw a young man make a 
most incredible leap. He had received a bullet under the 
shoulder, and when a man or a deer is hit there he always 
leaps. I heard afterwards that he recovered, though this is a 
vital place. 

It happened once that for a week the Republicans were 
kept from resisting or retaliating by their leaders, until the 



^'. 



LIFE ON THE PRESS. 339 

Democrats began to disgrace themselves by excesses. Then 
all at once the Eepublicans boiled over, thrashed their foes, 
and attacking the Copperhead clubs, tlirew their furniture 
out of the window, and — inadvertently perhaps — also a few 
Copperheads. Just before they let their angry passions rise 
in this fashion there came one night a delegation to serenade 
Colonel Forney at the office. The Colonel was grand on 
such occasions. He was a fine, tall, portly man, with a lion- 
like mien and a powerful voice. He began — 

" My friends, fellow-citizens and Republicans, you have 
this week acted nobly." 

Cries from the crowd, " We hev I ive hev ! " 

" You, when smitten on the right cheek, turned unto the 
oppressor the left." 

" We did ! we did ! " 

" You are beyond all question models — I may say with 
truth, paragons of patience, long-suifering, and humility. 
You are — Christian gentlemen ! " 

" We air ! we air I " 

While this was passing, a great gloomy thunder- 
cloud of the Democratic enemy gathered on the opposite 
sidewalk, and as the Colonel lifted his voice again, there 
came a cry — 

" Shut up, you d d old Eepublican dead-duck ! " 

That word was a spell to raise the devil withal. Bang ! 
bang ! bang ! went the revolvers of the Union men in a vol- 
ley, and the Democrats fled for their lives down Seventh 
Street, pursued by the meek, lowly, and long-suffering 
Christians — like rabbits before wolves. 

The enemy at last resolved to attack the Press and burn 
the building. Then we had one hundred and fifty policemen 
sent to garrison and guard. There was a surging, howling 
mob outside, and much guerilla-shooting, but all I can re- 
member is my vexation at having so much to disturb me in 
making up the paper. 

I never went armed in my life when I could help it, for I 



340 MEMOIRS. 

hate impedimenta in my pockets. All of us in tlie office 
hung up our coats in a dark place outside. Whenever I sent 
an assistant to get some papers from mine, he said that he 
always knew my coat because there was no pistol in it. 

Scenes such as these, and quite as amusing, were of con- 
stant occurrence in those days in Philadelphia. " All night 
long in that sweet little Tillage was heard the soft note of 
the pistol and the dying scream of the victim." Now, be it 
noted, that a stuffed dead duck had become the gonfalon or 
banner of the Eepublicans, and where it swung there the battle 
was fiercest. There was a young fellow from South Carolina, 
who had become a zealous Union man, and who made up for 
a sinful lack of sense by a stupendous stock of courage. One 
morning there came into the office an object — and such an 
object ! His face was all sv/athed and hidden in bloody 
bandages ; he was tattered, and limped, and had his arm in a 
sling. 

" In the name of Heaven, who and what are you ? " I ex- 
claimed. " And who has been passing you through a bark- 
mill that you look so ground-up ? " 

In a sepulchral voice he replied, " I'm , and last 

night / carried the dead duck ! " 

Till I came on the Press there was, it may be said, almost 
no community between the Germans of North Philadelphia 
and the Americans in our line. But I had become intimate 
with Von Tronk, a Hanoverian of good family, a lawyer, and 
editor, I believe, of the Freie Presse. I even went once or 
twice to speak at German meetings. In fact, I was getting to 
be considered " almost as all de same so goot ash Deutsch," and 
very " bopular." One day Von Tronk came with a request. 
There was to be an immense German Eepublican Masseii- 
versammhtng or mass-meeting in a great beer-garden. " If 
Colonel Forney could only be induced to address them ! " I 
undertook to do it. It was an entirely new field to him, but 
one wondrous rich in votes. Now Colonel Forney, though 
from Lancaster County and of German-Swiss extraction, 



LIFE ON THE PRESS. 3^;!^ 

knew not a word of the language, and I undertook to coach 
him. 

" You will only need one phrase of three words," I said, 
" to pull you through ; but you must pronounce them perfectly 
and easily. They are Freiheit unci Gleiclilieit^ 'freedom 
and equality.' Now, if you iplease, fry-height.^^ 

The Colonel went at his lesson, and being naturally clever, 
with a fine, deep voice, in a quarter of an hour could roar out 
Freiheit und Gleichheit with an intonation which would 
have raised a revolution in Berlin. We came to the garden, 
and there was an immense sensation. The Colonel had win- 
ning manners, with a manly mien, and he was duly intro- 
duced. When he rose to speak there was dead silence. He 
began — 

" Friends and German Fellow-citizens : — Yet why should I 
distinguish the words, since to me every German is a friend. 
I am myself, as you all know, of unmingled German ex- 
traction, and I am very, very proud of it. But there is one 
German sentiment which from a child has been ever in my 
heart, and from infancy ever on my lij^s, and that sentiment, 
my friends, is Freiheit und Gleichheit I " 

If ever audience was astonished in this world it was that 
of the Massenvei'sammlung when this burst on their ears. 
They hurrahed and roared and banged the tables in such a 
mad storm of delight as even Colonel Forney had never seen 
surpassed. Eising to the occasion, he thundered on, and as 
he reached the end of every sentence he repeated, with great 
skill and aptness, Freiheit und Gleichheit. 

" You have made two thousand votes by that speech. 
Colonel," I said, as we returned. " Von Tronk will manage 
it at this crisis." After that, when the Colonel jested, he 
would called me " the Dutch vote-maker." This was during 
the Grant campaign. 

Droll incidents were of constant occurrence in this life. 
Out of a myriad I will note a few. One day there came into 
our office an Indian agent from the West, who had brought 



342 MEMOIRS. 



witli him a Winnebago who claimed to be the rightful chief 
of his tribe. They were going to Washington to enforce the 
claim. While the agent conversed with some one the Indian 
was turned over to me. He was a magnificent specimen, six 
feet high, clad in a long trailing scarlet blanket, with a 
scarlet straight feather in his hair which continued him up 
ad infinitum^ and he was straight as a lightning rod. He 
was handsome, and very dignified and grave ; but I under- 
stood that. I can come it indifferent well myself when I 
am " out of my plate," as the French, say, in strange society. 
He spoke no English, but, as the agent said, knew six Indian 
languages. He was evidently a chief by blood, " all the way 
down to his moccasins." 

What with a few words of Kaw (I had learned about a 
hundred words of it with great labour) and a few other 
phrases of other tongues, I succeeded in interesting him. 
But I could not make him smile, and I swore unto myself 
that I would. 

Being thirsty, the Indian, seeing a cooler of ice-water, 
with the daring peculiar to a great brave, went and took a 
glass and turned on the spicket. He filled his glass — it was 
brim-full — but he did not know how to turn it off. Then I 
had him. As it ran over he turned to me an appealing help- 
less glance. I said "iVeos/iO." This in Pottawattamie means 
an inundation or overflowing of the banks, and is generally 
applied to the inundation of the Mississippi. There is a 
town on the latter so called. This was too much for the 
Indian, and he laughed aloud. 

" Great God ! what have you been saying to that Indian ? " 
cried the agent, amazed. " It is the first time he has laughed 
since he left home." 

" Only a little pun in Pottawattamie. But I really know 
very little of the language." 

" I have no knowledge of the Indian languages," remarked 
our city editor, MacGinnis, a genial young Irishman, " least 
of all, thank God ! of Pottawattamie. But I have always 



LIFE ON THE PRESS. 343 

understood that when a man gets so far in a tongue as to 
inake puns in it, it is time for him to stop." 

Years after this I was one evening in London p.t an open- 
ing of an exhibition of pictures. There were present Indian 
Hindoo princes in gorgeous array, English nobility, literary 
men, and fine ladies. Among them w^as an unmistakable 
Chippeway in a white Canadian blanket-coat, every inch an 
Indian. I began with the usual greeting, " Ro nitchi ! " 
(Ho, brother !), to which he gravely replied. I tried two or 
three phrases on him with the same effect. Then I played a 
sure card. Sinking my voice with an inviting wink, I uttered 
^'' Sliingaivauha^'' or whisky. " Dot fetched him." He too 
laughed. Gleich mit gleich^ gesellt sich gem. 

AVhile living in New York, and during my connection 
with the Press^ I often met and sometimes conversed with 
Horace Greeley. Once I went with him from Philadelphia 
to New York, and he was in the car the observed of all ob- 
servers to an extraordinary degree. He sat down, took out 
an immense roll of proof, and said, '•^ Lead pencil ! ^"^ One 
was immediately handed to him by some stranger, who was 
by that one act ennobled, or, what amounts to the same 
thing in America, grotesquely charactered for life. He was 
the man who gave Horace Greeley a lead pencil ! I, as his 
companion, was also regarded as above ordinary humanity. 
When the proof was finished " Horace " said to me — 

" How is John Forney getting on ? " 

" Like Satan, walking to and fro upon the face of the 
earth, going from the Chronicle in Washington one day to 
the Press in Philadelphia on the next, and filling them both 
cram full of leaders and letters." 

" Two papers, both daily ! I tell Forney that I find it is 
all I can do to attend to one. Tell him not to get too rich — 
bad for the constitution and worse for the country. Any 
man who has more than a million is a public nuisance." 

Finally, we walked together from the ferry to the corner 
of Park Place and Broadway, and the philosopher, after 



344 MEMOIRS. 

minutely explaining to me wliicli omnibus I was to take, bade 
me adieu. I do not think we ever met again. 

In the summer Colonel Forney went to Europe with John 
the junior. When he left he said, " I do not expect you to 
raise the circulation of the Press, but I hope that you will 
be able to keep it from falling in the dead season." I went 
to work, and what with enlarging the telegraphic news, and 
correspondence, and full reports of conventions, I materially 
increased the sale. It cost a great deal of money, to be sure, 
but the Colonel did not mind that. At this time there came 
into our office as associate with me Captain W. W. Nevin. 
He had been all through the war. I took a great liking to 
him, and we always remained intimate friends. All in our 
office except myself were from Lancaster County, the birth- 
place, I believe, of Fitch and Fulton. It is a Pennsylvania 
German county, and as I notoriously spoke German openly 
without shame ours was called a Dutch office. Once when 
Colonel Forney wrote a letter from Holland describing the 
windmills, the Sunday Transcriiyt unkindly remarked that 
" he had better come home and look after his own Dutch 
windmill at the corner of Seventh and Chestnut Streets." 

I had at this time a great deal to do with the operas and 
theatres, and often wrote the reviews. After a while, as Cap- 
tain Nevin relieved me of a great deal of work, and I had an 
able assistant named Norcross, I devoted myself chiefly to 
dramatic criticism and the weekly, and such work as suited 
me best. As for the dignity of managership. Captain Nevin 
and I tossed it from one to the other like a hot potato in 
jest, but between us we ran the paper very well. There was an 
opera impresario named Maurice Strakosch, of whom I had 
heard that he was hard to deal with and irritable. I forget 
now who the prima donna in his charge was, but there had 
appeared in our paper a criticism which might be interpreted 
in some detail unfavourably by a captious critic. One after- 
noon there came into the office, where I was alone, a gentle- 
manly-seeming man, who began to manifest anger in regard 



LIFE ON THE PRESS. 345 

to the criticism in question. I replied, " I do not know, sir, 
what your position in the opera troupe may be, but if it 
be anything which requires a knowledge of English, I am 
afraid that you are misplaced. There was no intention to 
offend in the remarks, and so far as the lady is concerned I 
shall only be too glad to say the very best I can of her. 
Cominenez^ monsieur^ c'est line lagateUeP He laughed, and 
we spoke French, then Italian, then German, and of Patti 
and Son tag and Lind. Then I asked him what he really 
was, and he replied, " I do not believe that you even know 
the name of my native tongue. It is Czech." I stared at 
him amazed, and said — 

"Veliky Bog! Eozprava pochesky? Nekrasneya rejece 

est." 

The Bohemian gentleman drew a handsomely bound 
book from his pocket. " Sir," he said, " this is my album. 
It is full of signatures of great artists, even of kings and 
queens and poets. There is not a name in it which is not 
that of a distinguished person, and I do not know what your 
name is, but I beg that you will write it in my book." 

Nearly the same scene was repeated soon after, with the 
same words, when the great actress Fanny Janauschek came 
to Philadelphia. At that time she played only in G-erman. 
Her manager, G-rau, introduced me to her, and she compli- 
mented me on my German, and praised the language as the 
finest in the Avorld. 

" Yes," I replied, " it is certainly very fine. But I know 
a finer, which goes more nearly to the heart, and with which 
I can move you more deeply." 

" And what is that ? " cried the great artist astonished. 

" It is," I replied, in her native tongue, " Bohemian. 
That is the language for me." 

Madame Janauschek was so affected that she burst out 
crying, though she was a woman of tremendous nerve. We 
became great friends, and often met again in after years in 
England. 



346 MEMOIRS. 

I have seen Eistori play for thirty nights in succession,* 
and Eachel and Sarah Bernhardt ; but as regards true genius, 
Janauschek in her earlier days was incomparably their su- 
perior ; for these all played from nerves and instinct, but 
Janauschek from her brain and intellect. I often wondered 
that she did not write pla3'S. It is said of Eachel that there 
was once a five-act play in which she died at the end of the 
fourth act. After it had had a long run she casually asked 
some one lioiv it ended. She had never read the fifth act. 
Such a story could never have been told of Janauschek. 

In the summer there were one or two railroad excursions 
to visit new branch roads in Pennsylvania. While on one of 
these I visited the celebrated Mauch Chunk coal mines, and 
rode on the switchback railway, where I had a fearfully 
narrow escape from death. This switchback is a montagne 
Riisse coming up and down a hill, and six miles in length. 
Yet, though the rate of speed is appalling, the engineer can 
stop the car in a few seconds' time with the powerful brake. 
We were going down headlong, when all at once a cow 
stepped out of the bushes on the road before us, and if we 
had struck her we must have gone headlong over the cliff 
and been killed. But by a miracle the engineer stopped the 
car just as we got to the cow. We were saved by a second. 
Something very like it had occurred to my wife and to me 
in 1859. We were going to Eeading by rail, when the train 
ran off the track and went straight for an embankment 
where there was a fall of 150 feet. It was stopped just as 
the locomotive protruded or looked over the precipice. Had 
there been the least trifle more of steam on at that instant 
we must all have perished. 

In November of this my second year on the Press 
my father died. One thing occurred on this sad bereave- 
ment which alleviated it a little. I had always felt all my 

* I am revising this MS. in the beautiful palazzo built for Ristori, 
22 Lung Arno Nuovo, Florence. It is now the Pensione Pellini. Ou 
the ground floor are statues representing Ristori in different parts. 



LIFE ON THE PRESS. 347 

life that he had never been satisfied with my want of a fixed 
career or position. He did not, I think, ve7'y much like 
John Forney, the audacious, reckless politician, but he still 
respected his power and success, and it astonished him a 
little, and many others quite as much, to find that I was in 
many respects Forney's right-hand man, and manager of a 
bold political paper which had a great inflaence. A day or 
two before he died my father expressed himself kindly to 
the effect that I had at last done well, and that he was satis- 
fied with me. At last, after so many years, he felt that I 
had etat — a calling, a definite position. In fact, in those 
days it was often said that Forney could make himself Presi- 
dent, as he indeed might have done but for certain errors, 
no greater than have been committed by more successful 
men, and a stroke of ill-luck such as few can resist. 

The winter passed quietly. I was extremely fond of my 
life and work. Summer came, and with it a great desire for 
a change and wild life and the West, for I had worked very 
hard. A very great railway excursion, which was destined 
to have a great effect, was being organised, and both my wife 
and I were invited to join it. Mr. John Edgar Thompson, 
the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Mr. Hinckley, 
of the Baltimore road, President Felton, Professor Leidy, 
Robert Lamborn, and a number of other notables, were 
to go to Duluth, on Lake Superior, and decide on the 
terminus of the railroad as a site for a city. Mrs. John E. 
Thompson had her own private car, which was seventy feet 
in length, and fitted up with every convenience and luxury. 
To this was added the same directors' car in which I had 
travelled to Minnesota. There were to be in all ten or twelve 
gentlemen and ten ladies. There was such efiScient service 
that one young man, a clerk, was detailed especially to look 
after our luggage. As we stopped every night at some hotel, 
he would inquire what we required to be taken to our rooms, 
and saw that it was brought back in the morning. I went 
off in such a hurry that I forgot my Indian blanket, nor had 



348 MEMOIRS. 

I any revolver or gun, all of which, especially the blanket, I 
sadly missed ere I returned. I got, before I left, a full white 
flannel or fine white cloth suit, which was then a startling 
novelty, and wore it to the Falls of the Mississippi. Little 
did I foresee that ere it gave out I should also have it on at 
the Cataracts of the Nile ! 

So we started and after a few hours' travel, stopped at 
Altona. There I was very much amused by an old darkey 
at the railway-station hotel, who had, as he declared, " spe- 
cially the kyar of de ladies an' quality." He had been a slave 
till the war broke out, and had been wondrously favoured by 
visions and revelations which guided him to freedom. " De 
Lawd he 'pear to me in a dream, an' I hyar a vi'ce which cry, 
* Simon, arise an' git out of dis, an' put f o' de Norf as fass 
as you kin travel, fo' de day of de 'pressor is at an end, an' 
you is to be free.' So I rosed an' fled, hardly a-waitin' to 
stufl my bag wid some corn-dodgers an' bacon, an' foller de 
Norf Star till I git confused an' went to sleep agin, wen, lo, 
an angel expostulated hisself befo' my eyes in a wision, an' 
say, 'Simon, beholdes' dou dat paif by de riber? Dat's de 
one fo' you to foller, ole son ! ' So I follers it till I git on de 
right trail. Den I met anoder nigger a-'scapin' from the 
bon's of captivity, an' carryin' a cold ham, an' I jined in wid 
him — you bet — an' so we come to de Lawd's country." 

And so gaily on to Chicago. We went directly to the 
first hotel, and as soon as I had toiletted and gone below, I 
saw on the opposite building a sign with the words Chicago 
Tribune, This was an exchange of ours, so I crossed over, 
and meeting the editor by chance in the doorway, was wel- 
comed and introduced to Governor Desbrosses, who stood by. 
Then I went to a telegraph office and sent a despatch to the 
Press. The man wanted me to pay. I told him to C. 0. D., 
" collect on delivery." He declined. I said, " Your princi- 
pal office is in Philadelphia, is it not ? — Third and Chestnut 
Streets. Just send a telegram and ask the name of your 
landlord. It's Leland, and Pm the man. If you make me 



LIFE ON THE PRESS. 349 

pay, I'll raise 3^oiir rent." He laughed heartily and let me 
off, but not without a parting shot : " You see, Mr. Leland, 
there are so many scallawags * from the East come here, that 
we are obliged to be a little particular." 

I returned to the hotel, and was immediately introduced 
to some one having authority. I narrated my late experi- 
ence. He looked at me and said, " How long have you been 
in Chicago?' I replied, " About thirty minutes." He an- 
swered gravely, " I think you'd better stay here. You'll suit 
the place." I was beginning to feel the moral influence of 
the genial air of the West. Chicago is emphatically what is 
termed " a place," and a certain amount of calm confidence 
in one's self is not in that city to any one's discredit. Once 
there was an old lady of a " hard " t3^pe in the witness-box in 
an American city. She glared round at the judge, the jury, 
and the spectators, and then burst out with, " You needn't 

all be staring at me in that way. I don't keer a for you 

all. I've lived eleven years in Chicago, and ain't affeard of 
the devil." Chicago is said in Indian to mean the place of 
skunks, but calling a rose a skunk-cabbage don't make it one. 

Walking on the edge of the lake near the city, the waters 
cast up a good-sized living specimen of that extraordinary 
fish-lizard, the great 7nenobranc7ms, popularly known as the 
hell-bender from its extreme ugliness. Owing to the im- 
mense size of its spermatozoa, it has rendered great aid to 
embryology, a science which, when understood au fond^ will 
bring about great changes in the human race. We were 
taken out in a steamboat to the end of the great aqueduct, 
which was, when built, pronounced, I think by the London 
Times^ to be the greatest engineering work of modern times. 

In due time we came to St. Paul, Minnesota.. We went 
to a very fair hotel and had a very good dinner. In the 
West it is very common among the commonalty to drink 
coffee and milk through dinner, and indeed with all meals, 

* Scallawag, from the Gaelic scallag, a vagabond. — D. MacRiichie. 
IG 



350 MEMOIRS. 

instead of wine or ale, but the custom is considered as vulgar 
by swells. Having finished dessert, I asked the Irish waiter 
to bring me a small cup of black coffee and brandy. Draw- 
ing himself up stiffl}^, Pat replied, "We don't serve caafy at 
dinner in tliis hotel." Tiiere was a grand roar of laughter, 
which the waiter evidently thought was at my expense, as he 
retreated smiling. 

We were kindly received in St. Paul by everybod}^ 
There is this immense advantage of English or American 
hospitality over that of all other countries, that it introduces 
us to the home^ and makes us forget that we are strangers. 
When we were at the end of the fearfully wearisome great 
moral circus known as the Oriental Congress, held all over 
Scandinavia in 1890, there came to me one evening in the 
station a great Norseman with his friends. With much 
would-be, ox-like dignity he began, " You ha-ave now expe- 
rienced de glorious haspitality oif our country. You will go 
oom and say " 

" Stop a minute there ! " I exclaimed, for I was bored to 
death with a show which had been engineered to tatters, and 
to half defeating all the work of the Congress, in order to 
glorify the King and Count Landberg. " I have been here 
in your country six weeks, and I had letters of introduction, 
and have made no end of acquaintances. I have been shown 
thousands of fireworks, which blind me, and offered dozens 
of champagne, which I never touch, and public dinners, 
which I did not attend. But during the whole time I have 
never once seen the inside of a Swedish or Norwegian house." 
Which was perfectly true, nor have I ever seen one to this 
day. There is a kind of " hospitality " which consists of 
giving yourself a grand treat at a tavern or cafe^ and in- 
viting your strangers to it to help you to be glorified. But 
to very domestic people and utter Philistines, domestic life 
lacks the charm of a brass band, and the mirrors and gilding 
of a restaurant or hotel ; therefore, what they themselves en- 
joy most, they, with best intent, but most unwisely, inflict on 



LIFE ON THE PRESS. 351 

more civilised folk. But in America and England, where 
home-life is ivorth living and abounding in every attraction, 
and public saloons are at a discount, the case is reversed. 
And in these Western towns, of which many were, so to 
speak, almost within hearing of the whoop of the savage or 
the howl of the wolf (as Leavenworth really was), we ex- 
perienced a refinement of true hos^^itality in homes — kind- 
ness and tact such as I have never known to be equalled save 
in Great Britain. One evening I was at a house in St. Paul, 
where I was struck by the beauty, refined manners, and 
agreeableness of our hostess, who was a real Chippeway or 
Sioux Indian, and wife of a retired Indian trader. She had 
been well educated at a Canadian French seminary. 

We were taken over to see the rival city of Minneapolis, 
of which word my brother Henry said it was a vile grinding 
up together of Greek and Indian. Minne means water ; 
Minnesota^ turbid water, and Minne-haha does not signify 
" laughing," but falling water. This we also visited, and I 
found it so charming, that I was delighted to think that for 
once an Indian name had been kept, and that the young 
ladies of the boarding-schools of St. Paul or Minneapolis 
had not christened or devilled it " Diana's Bath." 

We were received kindly by the Council of the city of 
Minneapolis. Half of them had come from the East affiicted 
with consumption, and all had recovered. But it is necessary 
to remain there to live. My wife's cousin, Mr. Eichard 
Price, who then owned the great saw-mill next the Fall of 
St. Anthony, came with this affliction from Philadelphia, and 
got over it. After six years' absence he returned to Phila- 
delphia, and died in six weeks of consumption. Strangely 
enough, consumption is the chief cause of death among the 
Indians, but this is due to their careless habits, wearing wet 
moccasins and the like. 

Now a great question arose. It was necessary for the 
magnates of our party to go to Duluth, and to do this they 
must make a seven days' journey through the wilderness, 



352 MEMOIRS. 

either on a very rough military road cut through the woods 
during the war, or sometimes on no road at all. Houses or 
post-stations, often of only one or two rooms, were sometimes 
a day's journey apart. The question was whether delicate 
ladies, utterly unaccustomed to anything like hard travel, 
could take this trip, during w^hich they must endure clouds 
of mosquitos, put up with camp-cooking, or often none, and 
otherwise go through privations such as only an Indian or a 
frontiersman would care to experience ? The entire town of 
St. Paul, and all the men of our party, vigorously opposed 
taking the ladies, while I, joining the latter, insisted on it 
that they could go ; for, as I said to all assembled, where 
the devil is afraid to go he sends a woman ; and I had always 
observed that in travelling, long after men are tired out 
women are generally all right. They are never more played 
out than they loant to he. 

" Femme plaint, femme deult, 
Fern me est malade quand elie vault, 
Et par Sainte Marie ! 
Quand elle veult elle est guerye." 

And of course loe carried the day. Twelve men, even 
though backed up by a city council, have no chance against any 
ten women. To be sure women, like all other savages, re- 
quire a male leader — I mean to say, just as Goorkha troops, 
though brave as lions, must have an English captain — so they 
conquered under my guidance ! 

Having had experience in fitting out for the wilderness, I 
was requested to see to the stores — so many hams to so many 
people for so many days, so much coffee, and so forth. I 
astonished all by insisting that there should be one tm cup 
to every traveller. " Every glass you have will soon be 
broken," I said. And so it was, sooner than I expected. As 
tin cups could not be found in St. Paul, we bought three or 
four dozen small tin basins of about six inches diameter at 
the rim, and when champagne was served out it was, faute 
de mieux, drunk from these eccentric goblets. 



LIFE ON THE PRESS. 353 

In the first waggon were Mr. and Mrs. Thompson and 
Mrs. Leland. Their driver was a very eccentric Canadian 
Frencliman named Louis. He was to the last degree polite 
to the ladies, but subject to attacks of Indian rage at mere 
trifles, when he would go aside, swear, and destroy something 
like a lunatic in a fury, and then return quite happy and 
serene. I was in the second waggon with three ladies, a man 
being wanted in every vehicle. Our driver was named 
George, and he was altogether like Brigham, minus the 
Mexican-Spanish element. George had, however, also lived 
a great deal among Indians, and been at the great battle of 
the Chippeways and Sioux, and was fall of interesting and 
naive discourse. 

Of course, we of the two leading waggons all talked to 
Louis in French, who gave himself great airs on it. One 
morning George asked me in confidence, " Mr. Leland, you're 
not all French, are you ? " " Certainly not," I replied ; " we're 
from Philadelphia." "Well," replied George, "so I told 
Louis, but he says you are French, like him, and shut me up 
by askin' me if I hadn't heard you talkin' it. Now what I 
want to know is, if you're not French, how came the tuliole 
of you to know it ? " I explained to George, to his astonish- 
ment, that in the East it was usual for all well-educated per- 
sons, especially ladies, to learn it. I soon became as intimate 
with George as I had been with Brigham, and began to learn 
Chippeway of him, and greet the Indians whom we met. 
One day George said — 

" Of course you have no Indian blood in you, Mr. Leland ; 
but weren't you a great deal among 'em when you were young?" 

" Why ? " 

" Because you've got queer little old Injun ways. When- 
ever you stop by the roadside to talk to anybody and sit 
down, you always rake the small bits of wood together and 
pull out a match and make a smudge " (a very smoky fire 
made by casting dust on it), " just like an Indian in an Injun 
kind of way." (In after years I found this same habit of 



354 MEMOIRS. 

making fires of small bits of wood peculiar to old English 
gypsies.) 

The smudge is the great summer institution of Minne- 
sota. It is the safeguard against mosquitos. They are all 
over the State in such numbers that they constitute a plague. 
We all wore all the time over our faces and necks a kind of 
guard or veil, shaped exactly like an Egyptian fanous or 
folding lantern. It is cylindrical, made of tulle or coarse 
lace, with rings. At every house people sat in the porticos 
over a tin bucket, in which there was a smudge — that is to 
say, in smoke. In the evening some one goes with a tin or 
iron pail containing a smudge, and fills the bedrooms with 
dense smoke. One evening Mr. Hinckley and another of our 
party went fishing without veils. They returned with their 
necks behind swollen up as if with goitres or Kroj^fe. I knew 
a young Englishman who with friends, somewhere beyond 
Manitoba, encountered such a storm of mosquitos that their 
oxen were killed, and the party saved themselves by riding 
away on horseback. So he told me. 

At the stations — all log-houses — the ladies collected pil- 
lows and buffalo blankets, and, making a great bed, all slept 
in one room. We men slept in waggons or under a tent, 
which was not quite large enough for all. The Indian 
women cut spruce twigs and laid them over-lapping on the 
ground for our bed. By preference I took the outside, al 
fresco. One night we stayed at a house which had an upper 
and a lower storey. The ladies camped upstairs. In the 
morning, when we men below awoke, all took a drink of 
whisky. There entered a very tall Indian, clad in a long 
black blanket, who looked on very approvingly at the drink- 
ing. I called to my wife above to hand me down my 
whisky flask. " There is a big Indian here who wants a 
drink," I remarked. " I think I know," she replied, " who 
that big Indian is," but handed down the flask. "Don't 
waste whisky on an Indian^'' said one of my companions. 
But I filled the cup with a tremendous slug, and handed it 



LIFE ON THE PRESS. 355 

to the Objibway. He took it down like milk, and never a 
word spoke he, but when it was swallowed he looked at me 
and winked. Such a wink as that was ! I think I see it 
now — so inspired with gratitude and humour as to render all 
words needless. He had a rare sense of tact and gratitude. 
Soon after I was sitting out of doors among a few ladies, 
when the Indian, who had divined that I was short of Chip)- 
peway and wished to learn, stalked up, and pointing to our 
beauty, said gravely, squoaJi — i. e., woman. Then he indi- 
cated several other articles, told me the Indian name for 
each, and walked away. It was all he could do. The ladies, 
who could not imagine why this voluntary lesson was given 
to me, were much amused at it. But / understood it ; he had 
seen the Injun in me at a glance, and knew what I wanted 
most ! 

One night we stopped at a place called Kettle Eiver. It 
was very picturesque. Over the rushing stream the high 
rocky banks actually overhung the water. I got into a birch 
canoe with my wife, and two Indian boys paddled us, while 
others made a great fire on the cliff above, which illuminated 
the scene. Other Indian youths jumped into the water and 
swam about and skylarked, whooping wildly. It reminded me 
strangely of the Blue Grotto of Capri, where our boatmen 
jumped in and swam in a sulphur-azure glow, only that this 
was red in the firelight. 

Our whisky ran short — it always does on all such excur- 
sions — and our drivers in consequence became very " short " 
also, or rather unruly. But hoii cliemin^ mal cJiemin, we 
went on, and the ladies, as I had predicted, pulled through 
merrily. 

One day, at a halt, I found, with the ladies, in the woods 
by a stream, a pretty sight. It was a wigwam, which was 
very open, and which had been made to look like a bower 
with green boughs. When I was in the artillery I was the only 
person who ever thus adorned our tent in Indian style. It is 
very pleasant on a warm day, and looks artistic. In the wig- 



356 MEMOIRS. 

warn sat a pretty Indian woman with a babe. The ladies 
were, of course, at once deeply interested, but the Indian 
.could not speak English. One of the ladies had a common 
Japanese fan, with the picture of a grotesque god, and I at 
once saw my way to interest our hostess. 

I once read in the journal of a missionary's wife in Can- 
ada that she had a curious Malay or Cingalese dagger, with 
a curved blade and wooden sheath, while on the handle was 
the figure of an idol. One day she showed this to an Indian, 
and the next day he came with five more, and these again 
with fifteen, till it seemed as if the whole country had gone 
Avild over it. Very much alarmed at such heathenism, the 
lady locked it up and would show it no more. Ere she did 
so, she asked an old Indian how it was possible to make a 
scabbard of one piece of wood, with a hole in it to fit the 
blade. This man, who had been one of the most devoted 
admirers of the deity on the handle, saw no puzzle in this. 
He explained that the hole was burned in by heating the 
blade. 

I showed the god on the fan to the Indian woman, and 
said, '-^ Manitil — Hcliee manitu'''' ("a god — a great god"). 
She saw at once that it was heathen, and her heart went 
out unto it with great delight. With a very few Chippeway 
words and many signs I explained to her that forty days' 
journey from us was the sea, and forty days beyond another 
country where the people had this manifou. I believe that the 
lady gave her the fan, and it may be that she worships it to 
this day. How absurd it is to try to force on such people 
Catholic or Protestant forms, which they do not understand 
and never will, while their souls take in with joy the poly- 
pantheistic developments of supernaturalism, and that which 
suits their lives. Like the little boy who tliovght he would 
like to have a Testament, but knew he wanted a squirt, the 
Indian, unable to rise to the grandeur of monotheistic trini- 
tarianism, is delighted with goblins, elves, and sorcery. He 
can manage the squirt. 



LIFE ON THE PRESS. 357 

At Fond-du-Lac I became acquainted with a Mr. Duffy, 
a very genial and clever man, a son of a former governor of 
Ehode Island. He had an Indian wife and family, and was 
looked up to by the Indians as KitcMmbkomon^ " the white 
man." That he was a gentleman will appear from the fol- 
lov/ing incident. There was one of our party w^ho, to put it 
mildly, was not remarkable for refinement. A trader at 
Fond-du-Lac had a very remarkable carved Indian pipe, for 
which he asked me fifteen dollars. It certainly was rather a 
high price, so I offered ten. Immediately the man of whom 
I spoke laid down fifteen dollars and took the pipe. He was 
dans son droit, but the action was churlish. It seemed so to 
Duffy, who was standing by. After I had returned to Phila- 
delphia, Mr. Duffy sent me a very handsome pipe for a pres- 
ent, which he assured me had been smoked at two grand 
councils. He was indeed a " white man." 

There was an old Indian here whose name in In- 
dian meant " He who changes his position while sitting," 
but white people called him Martin "for short." He was 
wont to smoke a very handsome pipe. One day, seeing him 
smoking a wretched affair rudely hewn, I asked him if he 
had not a better. He replied, " I had, but I sold it to the 
kcheemo-komon iqueh " — the long-knife woman (?*. e., to a 
white lady). Inquiry proved that the "long-knife w^oman " 
was Miss Lottie Foster, a very beautiful and delicate young 
lady from Philadelphia, to whom such a barbaric term seemed 
strangely applied. As for me, because I always bought every 
stone pipe which 1 could get, the Indians called me Poaugun 
or Pipe. Among the Algonkin of the East in after-days I 
had a name which means he who seeks hidden things (^. ^., 
mysteries). 

We came to Duluth. There were in those days exactly 
six houses and twenty-six Indian wigwams. However, we 
were all accommodated somehow. Here 'there were grand 
conferences of the railroad kings with the authorities of Du- 
luth and Superior City, which was a few miles distant, and 



358 MEMOIRS. 

as the Dulutherans outbid the Father Superiors, the terminus 
of the road was fixed at Duluth. 

It was arranged that the ladies should remain at Duluth, 
while we, the men, were to go through the woods to examine 
a situation a day's march distant. We had Indians to carry 
our luggage. Every man took a blanket and a cord, put his 
load into it, turned the ends over the cord, and then drew it 
up like a bag. They carried very easily from 150 to 250 lbs. 
weight for thirty miles a day over stock and stone, up and 
down steep banks or amid rotten crumbling trees and moss. 
Though a good walker, I could not keep up with them. 

I had with me a very genial and agreeable man as walk- 
ing companion. His name was Stewart, and he was mayor, 
chief physician, and filled half-a-dozen other leading capaci- 
ties in St. Paul. Our fellow-travellers vanished in the for- 
est. Mayor Stewart and I with one Indian carrier found 
ourselves at two o'clock very thirsty indeed. The view was 
beautiful enough. A hundred yards below us by the steep 
precipice rushed the St. Lav/rence, but we could not get at 
it to drink. 

Stewart threw himself on the grass in despair. " Yes," 
he cried, " we're lost in the wilderness, and I'm going to die 
of thirst. Eem ember me to my family. " I say," he sud- 
denly cried, " ask that Injun the name of that river." 

I asked of the Indian, " Wa go nin-iu ? " (" How do j^ou 
call that ? ") Thinking I wanted to know the name for a 
stream, he replied, " Sehe.'^'* This is the same as sipi in 
Missis-sippi. 

" I knew it," groaned Stewart. " There is no such river 
as the Sebe laid down on the map. We're lost in an unknown 
region." 

"It occurs to me," I said, "that this is a judgment on 
me. When I think of the number of times in my life when 
I have walked past bar-rooms and neglected to go in and take 
a drink, I must think that it is a retribution." 

" And I say," replied Stewart, " that if you ever do get 



LIFE ON THE PRESS. 359 

back to civilisation, you'll be the old toper that ever 



was." 



When we came to the camp we found there by mere 
chance a large party of surveyors. As there were thirty or 
forty of us, it was resolved, as so many white men had never 
before been in that region, to constitute a township and elect 
a member to the Legislature, or Congress, or something — I 
forget what ; but it appeared that it was legal, and it was 
actually done — I voting with the rest as a settler. I, too, am 
a Minnesot. 

We railroad people formed one party and sat at our even- 
ing meal by ourselves, the surveyors made another, and the 
Indians a third taUe-cVhote. An open tin of oystei's was be- 
fore us, and somebody said they were not good. One only 
needs say so to ruin the character of an oyster — and too often 
of " a human bivalve," as the Indiana orator said. We were 
about to pitch it away, when I asked the attendant to give it 
to the Indians. It was gravely passed by them from man 
to man till it came to the last, who lifted it to his mouth 
and drank off the entire quarts oysters mid all, as if it 
had been so much cider. Amazed at this, I asked what it 
meant, but the only explanation I could get was, " He like 
um oyster." 

This was a charming excursion, all through the grene 
wode wilde, and I enjoyed it. I had Indian society, and 
learned Indian talk, and bathed in charming rushing waters, 
and saw enormous pine trees 300 feet high, and slept alfresco, 
and ate ad liMturn. To this day its remembrance inspires in 
me a feeling of deep, true poetry. 

I think it was at Duluth that one morning there was 
brought in an old silver cross which had just been found in 
an Indian grave on the margin of the lake, not very far away. 
I went there with some others. It was evidently the grave 
of some distinguished man who had been buried about a hun- 
dred years ago. There were the decayed remains of an old- 
fashioned gun, and thousands of small beads adhering, still 



360 MEMOIRS. 

in pattern, to the tihice. I dug up myself — in fact they al- 
most lay on the surface, the sand being blown away — several 
silver bangles, which at first looked exactly like birch-bark 
peelings, and, what I very much prized, two or three stone 
cylinders or tubes, about half an inch in diameter, with a 
hole through them. Antiquaries have been much puzzled 
over these, some thinking that they were musical instru- 
ments, others implements for gambling. My own theory 
always was that they w^ere used for smoking tobacco, and as 
those which I found were actually stuffed full of dried semi- 
decayed " fine cut," I still hold to it. I also purchased from 
a boy a red stone pipe-head, which was found in the same 
grave. I should here say that the pipe which had been 
bought away from me by the man above mentioned had on 
it the carving of a reindeer^ which rendered it to me alone of 
living men peculiarly valuable, since I have laboured hard, 
and subsequently set forth in my " Algonkin Legends " the 
theory that the Algonkin Indians went far to the North and 
there mingled with the Norsemen of Greenland and Labra- 
dor. The man who got the pipe promised to leave it to me 
when he died, but he departed from life and never kept his 
word. A frequent source of grief to me has been to see ob- 
jects of great value, illustrating some point in archaeology, 
seized as " curiosities " by ignorant wealthy folk. The most 
detestable form of this folly is the buying of incMnabula^ first 
editions or uncut copies, and keeping them from publication 
or reading, and, in short, of worshipping anything, be it a 
book or a coin, merely because it is rare. Men never ex- 
patiate on rariora in literature or in china, or talk cookery 
and wanes over-much, without showing themselves prigs. It 
is not any beauty in the thing^ but the delightful sense of 
their own culture or wealth which they cultivate. When 
there is nothing in a thing but mere rarity and cost to com- 
mend it, it is absolutely worthless, as is the learning and con- 
noisseurship thereupon dependent. 

Business concluded, we took a steamboat, and were very 



LIFE ON THE PRESS. 361 

sea-sick on Lake Superior for twenty-four hours. Then we 
went to the Isle Koyale, and saw the mines, which had been 
worked even by the ancient Mexicans ; also an immense mass 
of amethysts. The country here abounds in agates. At Mar- 
quette there was brought on board a single piece of pure vir- 
gin copper from the mine which weighed more than 4,000 
pounds. There it was, I think, that we found our cars wait- 
ing, and returned in them to Philadelphia. 

It was at this time that my brother Henry died, and his 
loss inflicted on me a terrible mental blow, which went far, 
subsequently, to bring about a great crisis in my health. My 
dear brother was the most remarkable illustration of the fact 
that there are men who, by no fault of their own, and who, 
despite the utmost honour or integrity, deep intelligence, 
good education, and varied talents, are overshadowed all 
their lives by sorrow, and meet ill-luck at every turn. He 
went at sixteen as employe into a Cuban importing house, 
where he learned Spanish. His principal failed, and thence 
he passed to a store in Xew York, where he worked far too 
hard for $600 a year. His successor, who did much less, was 
immediately paid 12,500 per annum. Finding that his em- 
l^loyer was being secretly ruined by his partner, he warned 
the former, but only with the result of being severely repri- 
manded by the merchant and my father as a mischief-maker. 
After a while this merchant was absolutely ruined and bank- 
rupted by his partner, as he himself declared to me, but, like 
many men, still kept his rancune against my poor brother. 
By this time the eyesight and health of Henry quite gave out 
for some time. Every effort which he made, whether to get 
employment, to become artist or writer, failed. He published 
two volumes of tales, sporting sketches, &c., with Lippincott, 
in Philadelphia, which are remarkable for originality. One 
of them was subsequently written out by another distin- 
guished author in another form. I do not say it was after 
my brother's, for I have known another case in which two 
men, having heard a story from Barnum, both published it, 



362 MEMOIRS. 

ignorant that the other had done so. But I would declare, in 
justice to my brother, that he told this story, which I am sure 
the reader knows, quite as well as did the other. 

He travelled a great deal, was eighteen months in Rome 
and its vicinity, visited Algeria, Egypt, and Cuba and the 
West, always spending so little money that my father ex- 
pressed his amazement at it. I regret to say that in my 
youth I never astonished him in this way. But this morbid 
conscientiousness or delicacy as to being dependent did him 
no good, for he might just as well have been thoroughly com- 
fortable, and my father would never have missed it. The 
feeling that he could get no foothold in life, which had long 
troubled me, became a haunting spectre which followed him 
to the grave. His work " Americans in Rome " is one of the 
cleverest, most sparkling, and brilliant works of humour, 
without a trace of vulgarity, ever written in America. It 
had originally some such title as " Studios and Mountains," 
but the publisher, thinking that the miserable clap-trap title of 
" Americans in Rome " would create an impression that there 
was " gossip," and possibly scandal, in it, insisted on that. It 
was published in the weary panic of 1862 in the war, and fell 
dead from the press. Though he never really laughed, and 
was generally absolutely grave, my brother had an incredibly 
keen sense of fun, and in conversation could far outmaster 
or " walk over the head " of any humorist whom I ever met. 
He was very far, however, from showing off or being a pro- 
fessional wit. He was very fond, when talking with men 
who considered themselves clever, of making jests or puns 
in such a manner and in such an unaffected ordinary tone of 
voice that they took no note of the quodlibets. He enjoyed 
this much more than causing a laugh or being complimented. 
But taking his life through, he was simply unfortunate in 
everything, and his worst failures were when he made wisely 
directed energetic efforts to benefit himself or others. He 
rarely complained or grieved, having in him a deep fo7id of 
what I, for want of a better term, call Indian nature^ or 



LIFE ON THE PRESS. 353 

stoicism, which is common in Americans, and utterly incom- 
prehensible to, or rarely found in, a European. 

The death of my father left me a fifth of his property, 
which was afterwards somewhat augmented by a fourth 
share of my poor brother's portion. For one year I drew 
no money from the inheritance, but went on living as before 
on my earnings, so that my wife remarked it really took me 
a year to realise that I had any money. After some months 
I bought a house in Locust Street, just opposite to where 
my father had lived, and in this house I remained six months 
previously to going to Europe in 1869. We had coloured 
servants, and I never in all my life, before or since, lived so 
well as during this time. The house was well furnished ; 
there was even the great luxury of no piano, which is a great 
condition of happiness. 

This year I was fearfully busy. As I had taken the dra- 
matic criticism in hand, for which alone we had always em- 
ployed a man, I went during twelve months 140 times to the 
opera, and every evening to several theatres, et cetera. Once 
I was caught beautifully. There had been an opera bouffe, 
the "Grande Duchesse" or something, running for two or 
three weeks, and I had written a criticism on it. This w^as 
laid over by " press of matter," but as the same play was an- 
nounced for the next night with the same performers, we 
published the critique. But it so chanced that the opera by 
some accident was not played ! The Evening Bulletin^ my 
old paper, rallied me keenly on this blunder, and I felt 
badly. John Forney, jun., however, said it was mere rub- 
bish of no consequence. He was such an arrant Bohemian 
and hardened son of the press, that he regarded it rather as 
a joke and a feather in our caps, indicating that we were a 
bounding lot, and not tied down to close observances. Truly 
this is a very fine spirit of freedom, but it may be carried too 
far, as I think it was by a friend of mine, who had but one 
principle in life, and that was never to write his newspaper 
correspondence in the place from which it was dated. It 



364 MEMOIRS. 

came to pass that about three weeks after this retribution 
overtook the Bulletin^ for it also published a review of an 
opera which was not sung, but I meanly passed the occur- 
rence by without comment. AYhen a man hits you, it is far 
more generous, manly, and fraternal to hit him back a good 
blow than to degrade him by silent contempt. 

The Presidential campaign between Grant and Johnson 
was beginning to warm up. Colonel Forney was in a cy- 
clone of hard work between AYashington, Pennsylvania, and 
New York, carrying on a thousand plots and finely or 
coarsely drawn intrigues, raising immense sums, speaking in 
public, and, not to put it too finely, buying or trading votes 
in a thousand tortuous or " mud-turtlesome and possum-like 
ways" — for no7i possiwms was not in his Latin. Never 
shall I forget the disgust aud indignation with which the 
great Republican champion entered the office one evening, 
and, flinging himself on a chair, declared that votes in New 
Jersey had gone up to sixty dollars a head ! And I was 
forced to admit that sixty dollars for a Jerseyman did seem 
to be an exorbitant price. So he went forth on the war-path 
with fresh paint and a sharp tomahawk. 

It often happened to me in his absence to have very cu- 
rious and critical decisions in my power. One of these is the 
" reading in " or " reading out " of a man from his party. 
This is invariably done by a leading political newspaper. I 
remember, for instance, a man who had been very prominent 
in politics, and gone over to the Democrats, imploring me to 
readmit him to the fold ; but, as I regarded him as a mere 
office-hunter, I refused to do it. Excommunicatus sit! 

There was a very distinguished and able man in a very 
high position. To him I had once addressed a letter begging 
a favour which would have been nothing at all to grant, but 
which was of great importance to me, and he had taken no 
notice of it. It came to pass that we had in our hands to 
publish certain very damaging charges against this great 
man. He found it out, and, humiliated, I may say agonised 



LIFE ON THE PRE^S. 3^5 

with shame and fear, he called with a friend, begging that 
the imputations might not be published. I believe from my 
soul that if I had not been so badly treated by him I should 
have refused his request, but, as it was, I agreed to withdraw 
the charges. It was the very best course, as I afterwards 
found. I am happy to say that, in after years, and in other 
lands, he showed himself very grateful to me. I am by na- 
ture as vindictive as an unconverted Indian, and as I am 
deeply convinced that it is vile and wicked, I fight vigor- 
ously against it. In my Illustrated JVetvs days in New York 
I used to keep an old German hymn pasted up before me in 
the sanctum to remind me not to be revengeful. Out of all 
such battling of opposing principles come good results. I 
feel this in another form in the warring within me of suj^er- 
stitious feeli7igs and scientific convictions. 

It became apparent that on Pennsylvania depended the 
election of President. The State had only been prevented 
from turning Copperhead-Democrat — which was the same 
as seceding — by the incredible exertions of the Union 
League, led by George H. Boker, and the untiring aid of 
Colonel Forney. But even now it was very uncertain, and 
in fact the election — on which the very existence of the 
Union virtually depended — was turned by only a few hun- 
dred votes ; and, as Colonel Forney and George H. Boker 
admitted, it would have been lost but for what I am going to 
narrate. 

There were many thousand Republican Clubs all through 
the State, but they had no one established official organ or 
newspaper. This is of vast importance, because such an or- 
gan is sent to doubtful voters in large numbers, and gives the 
keynote or clue for thousands of speeches and to men stump- 
ing or arguing. It occurred to me early to make the Weekly 
Press this organ. I emplojTd a young man to go to the 
League and copy all the names and addresses of all the thou- 
sands of Republican clubs in the State. Then I had the 
paper properly endorsed by the League, and sent a copy to 



366 MEMOIRS. 

every club at cost price or for nothing. This proved to be a 
tremendous success. It cost us money, but Colonel Forney 
never cared for that, and he greatly admired the coiq). I 
made the politics hot, to suit country customers. I found 
the gun and Colonel Forney the powder and ball, and be- 
tween us we made a hit. 

One day Frank Wells, of the Bulletiii (very active indeed 
in the Union League), met me and asked if I, since I had 
lived in New York, could tell them anything as to what kind 
of a man George Francis Train really was. " He has come 
over all at once," he said, " from the Democratic party, and 
wishes to stump Pennsylvania, if we will pay him his ex- 
penses." I replied — 

" I know Train personally, and understand him better 
than most men. He is really a very able speaker for a popu- 
lar American audience, and will be of immense service if 
rightly managed. But you must get some steady, sensible 
man to go with him and keep him in hand and regulate ex- 
penses, &c." 

It was done. After the election I conversed with the one 
who had been the bear-leader, and he said — 

" It was an immense success. Train made thousands of 
votes, and was a most effective speaker. His mania for 
speaking was incredible. One day, after addressing two or 
three audiences at different towns, we stopped at another to 
dine. While waiting for the soup, I heard a voice as of a 
public speaker, and looking out, saw Train standing on a 
load of hay, addressing a thousand admiring auditors." 

There are always many men who claim to have carried 
every Presidential election — the late Mr. Guiteau was one of 
these geniuses — but it is also true that there are many who 
would by not working have produced very great changes. 
Forney was a mighty wire-puller, if not exactly before the 
Lord, at least before the elections, and he opined that I had 
secured the success. There were certainly other men — e. g.^ 
Peacock, who influenced as many votes as the Weekly Press^ 



LIFE ON THE PRESS. 367 

and George Francis Train — without whose aid Pennsylvania 
and Grant's election would have been lost, but it is something 
to have been one of the few who did it. 

"When General Grant came in, he resolved to have nothing 
to do with " corrupt old politicians,'^ even though they had 
done him the greatest service. So he took up with a lot of 
doubly corrupt young ones, who were only inferior to the 
veterans in ability. Colonel Forney was snubbed cruelly, in 
order to rob him. Whatever he had done wrongly, he had 
done his ivork rightly, and if Grant intended to throw his 
politicians overboard, he should have informed them of it 
before availing himself of their services. His conduct was 
like that of the old lady who got a man to saw three cords of 
wood for her, and then refused to pay him because he had 
been divorced. 

I had never in my life asked for an office from anybody. 
Mr. Charles A. Dana once said that the work I did for the 
Eepublican party on Vcmity Fair alone was worth a foreign 
mission, and that was a mere trifle to what I did with the 
Continental Magaziiie, my pamphlet, &c. When Grant Avas 
President, I petitioned that a little consulate worth $1,000 
(£200) might be given to a poor Episcopal clergyman, but a 
man accustomed to consular work, who spoke French, and 
who had been secretary to two commodores. It was for a 
small French town. It was supported by Forney and George 
H. Boker ; but it was refused because I was " in Forney's 
set," and the consulate was given to a Western man who did 
not know French. 

If John Forney, instead of using all his immense influ- 
ence for Grant, had opposed him tooth and nail, he could 
not have been treated with more scornful neglect. The pre- 
tence for this was that Forney had defaulted $40,000 ! I 
know every detail of the story, and it is this : — AVhile Forney 
was in Europe, an agent to whom he had confided his affairs 
did take money to that amount. As soon as Forney learned 
this, he promptly raised $40,000 by mortgage on his prop- 



368 MEMOIRS. 

erty, and repaid the deficit. Even his enemy Simon Cam- 
eron declared he did not believe the story, and the engine of 
Ms revenge was always run by " one hundred Injun power." 

I had " met " Grant several times, when one day in Lon- 
don I was introduced to him again. He said that he was 
very happy to make my acquaintance. I replied, *' General 
Grant, I have had the pleasure of being introduced to yon 
six times already, and I hope for many happy renewals of it." 
A week or two after, this appeared in Punchy adapted to a 
professor and a duchess. 

When the Sanitary Fair was held in Philadelphia in 1863, 
a lady in New York wrote to Garibaldi, begging him for 
some personal souvenir to be given to the charity. Garibaldi 
replied by actually sending the dagger which he had carried 
in every engagement, expressing in a letter a hope that it 
might pass to General Grant. But a warm partisan of Mc- 
Clellan so arranged it that there should be an election for 
the dagger between the partisans of Grant and McClellan, 
every one voting to pay a dollar tp the Fair. For a long 
time the McClellanites were in a majority, but at the last 
hour Miss Anna M. Lea, now Mrs. Lea Merritt, very clevcily 
brought down a party of friends, who voted for Grant, secured 
the dagger for him, and so carried out the wish of Garibaldi. 
Long after an amusing incident occurred relative to this. 
In conversation in London with Mrs. Grant, I asked her if 
the dagger had been received. She replied, " Oh, yes," and 
then added naively, " but wasn't it really all a liumlug 9 " 

The death of my father and brother within a year, the 
sudden change in my fortunes, the Presidential campaign, 
and, above all, the working hard seven days in the week, had 
been too much for me. I began to find, little by little, that 
I could not execute half the work to which I was accustomed. 
Colonel Forney was very kind indeed, and never said a word. 
But I began to apprehend that a break-down in my health 
was impending. I needed change of scene, and so resolved, 
finding, after due consideration, that I had enough to live on, 



LIFE ON THE PRESS. ' 369 

to go abroad for a long rest. It proved to be a very wise re- 
solve. So I rented my house, packed my trunks, and depart- 
ed, to be gone " for a year or two." 

I would say, in concluding this chapter, that Colonel John 
Forney was universally credited, with perfect justice, as hav- 
ing carried Grant's election. When Grant was about to deliver 
his inaugural speech, a stranger who stood by me, looking at 
the immense expectant crowd, remarked to a friend, " This 
is a proud day for John Forney ! " " Yes," replied the other, 
" the Dead Duck has elected Grant." But Forney cheerfully 
and generously declared that it v/as the Weelcly Press which 
had carried Pennsylvania, and that I had managed it entirely 
alone. All these things were known to thousands at the time, 
but we lived in such excitement that we made but little ac- 
count thereof. However, there are men of good repute still 
living who will amply confirm all that I have said of my work 
on the Continental Magazine; and that Abraham Lincoln 
himself did actually credit me with this is proved by the fol- 
lowing incident. Because I had so earnestly advocated Eman- v^ 
cipation as a war measure at a time when even the most fiery 
and advanced Abolition papers, such as the Trihune^ were 
holding back and shouting pas trop de zele — and as it proved 
wisely, by advocating it publicly — merely as a war measure — 
the President, at the request of George H. Boker, actually 
signed for me fifty duplicate very handsome copies of the 
Proclamation of Emancipation on parchment paper, to every 
one of which Mr. Seward also added his signature. One of 
these is now hanging up in the British Museum as my gift. 
I perfectly understood and knew at the time, as did all con- 
cerned, that this was a recognition, and a very graceful and 
appropriate one, of what I had done for Emancipation — 
Harvard having A.M.'d me for the same. The copies I pre- 
sented to the Sanitary Fair to be sold for its benefit, but there 
was not much demand for them ; what were left over I divided 
with George Boker. 



VII. 
EUROPE REVISITED. 

1869-1870. 

Voyage on the Pereire — General Washburne — I am offered a command 
in another French Revolution — Paris — J. Meredith Read and Pre- 
vost Paradol — My health — Spa — J. C. Hotten — Octave Delepierre — 
Heidelberg — Dresden — Julian Hawthorne and G. Lathrop — Verona 
— Venice — Rome — W. W. Story — Florence — Lorimer Graham — 
'• Breitmann " in the Royal Family — Tuscany. 

We sailed on the famed Pereire from New York to Brest 
in May, 1869. We had not left port before a droll incident 
occurred. On the table in the smoking-room lay a copy of 
the " Ballads of Hans Breitmann." A fellow-passenger asked 
me, " Is that your book ? " I innocently replied, " Yes." 
"Excuse me, sir," cried another, "it is wtwe." "I beg your 
pardon," I replied, " but it is really mine." " Sir, I honglit it." 
" I don't care if you did," I replied ; " it is mine — for I wrote 
it." There was a roar of laughter, and we all became ac- 
quainted at once. 

General Washburne was among the passengers. He had 
been appointed Minister to France and was going to Paris, 
where he subsequently distinguished himself during the siege 
by literally taking the place of seven foreign Ministers who 
had left, and kindly caring for all their proteges. It never 
occurred to the old frontiersman to leave a place or his duties 
because fighting was going on. I had a fine twelve-feet blue 
Indian blanket, which I had bought somewhere beyond 
Leavenworth of a trader. When sitting on deck wra^iped in 
it, the General would finger a fold lovingly, and say, " Ah ! 
the Indians always have good blankets ! " 



EUROPE REVISITED. 371 

We arrived in Brest, and Mrs. Leland, who had never 
before been in Europe, was much pleased at her first sight, 
early in the morning, of a French city ; the nuns, soldiers, 
peasants, and all, as seen from our window, were indeed very 
picturesque. We left that day by railway for Paris, and on 
the road a rather remarkable incident occurred. There was 
seated opposite to us a not very amiable-looking man of thirty, 
who might be of the superior class of mechanics, and who 
evidently regarded us with an evil eye, either because we were 
suspected Anglais or aristocrats. I resolved that he should 
become amicable. Ill-tempered though he might be, he was 
still polite, for at every stopping-place he got out to smoke, 
and extinguished his cigar ere he re-entered. I said to him, 
" Madame begs that you will not inconvenience yourself so 
much — pray continue to smoke in here." This melted him, 
as it would any Frenchman. Seeing that he was reading the 
Rappel^ I conversed " liberally." I told him that I had been 
captain of barricades in Forty-eight, and described in full the 
taking of the Tuileries. His blood was fired, and he con- 
fided to me all the details of a grand plot for a Revolution 
which he was going up to Paris to attend to, and offered me 
a prominent place among the conspirators, assuring me that 
I should have a glorious opportunity to fight again at the 
barricades ! I was appalled at his want of discretion, but 
said nothing. Sure enough, there came the emeute of the 
plebiscite, as he had predicted, but it was suppressed. George 
Boker wrote to me : " When I heard of a revolution in Paris, 
I knew at once that you must have arrived and had got to 
work." And when I told him that I knew of it in advance, 
and had had a situation offered me as leader, he dryly replied, 
" Oh, I suppose so — as a matter of course." It was certainly 
a strange coincidence that I left Paris in Forty-eight as a 
Revolutionary suspect^ and re-entered it in 1870 in very nearly 
the same capacity. 

We found agreeable lodgings at the Rond Point of the 
Champs Elysees. The day after our arrival 1 determined to 



372 MEMOIRS. 

arrange the terms of living with our landlord. He and his 
wife had the reputation of being fearful screws in their 
" items." So he, thinking I was a newly arrived and per- 
fectly ignorant American, began to draw the toils, and enu- 
merate so much for the rooms, so much for every towel, so 
much, I believe, for salt and every spoon and fork. I^asked 
him how much he would charge for everything in the lump. 
He replied, "J/ai5, Mo7isieui\ nous ne faisons j^as jamais 
comme cela a Parish Out of all patience, I burst out into 
vernacular : " Sacre nom de Dieu et mille tonner7'es^ vieux 
galopin ! you dare to tell me^ a vieux caralin du Quartier 
Latin^ that you cannot make arrangements ! Et depuisse- 
quand^ s^il vous plait ? " * He stared at me in blank amaze- 
ment, and then said with a smile : " Tiens ! Mo7isieur est 
done de nous!'''' "That I am," I replied, and we at once 
made a satisfactory compromise. 

We had pleasant friends, and saw the sights and shopped ; 
but I began to feel in Paris for the first time that the dreaded 
break-down or collapse which I had long apprehended was 
coming over me. There was a very clever surgeon and 
physician named Laborde, who was called Nelaton's right- 
hand man. I met him several times, and he observed to a 
mutual friend that I was evidently suffering seriously from 
threatening nervous symptoms, and that he would like to 
attend me. He did so, and gave me daily a teaspoonful of 
bromide of potassium. This gave me sleep and appetite; 
but, after some weeks or months, the result was a settled, 
mild melancholy and tendency to rest. In fact, it was nearly 
eighteen months before I recovered so that I could write or 
work, and live as of old. 

I had inherited from both parents, and suffered all my 
life fearfully at intervals, from brachycephalic or dorsal 
neuralgia. Dr. Laborde made short work of this by giving 
me appallingly strong doses of tincture of aconite a7id sul- 

* For depuisse-quand, vide Paul de Kock. 



EUROPE REVISITED. 373 

pliate of quinine. Chemists have often been amazed at the 
prescription. But in due time the trouble quite disappeared, 
and I now, laus Deo ! very rarely ever have a touch of it. 
As many persons suffer terribly from this disorder, which is 
an acUing in the back of the head and neck accompanied by 
" sick headache," I give the ingredients of the cure ; the 
proper quantity must be determined by the physician.* 

We dined once with Mr. Washburne, who during dinner 
showed his extreme goodness of heart in a very characteristic 
manner. Some foolish American had during the emeiite — in 
which I was to have been a leader, had I so willed — got him- 
self into trouble, not by fighting, but through mere prying 
Yankee " curiosity " and mingling with the crowd. Such 
people really deserve to be shot more than any others, for 
they get in the way and spoil good fighting. He was de- 
servedly arrested, and sent for his Minister, who, learning it, 
at once arose, drove to the prefecture^ and delivered his in- 
quisitive compatriot. On another occasion we were the guests 
of J. Meredith Eead, then our Minister to Athens, where we 
met Prevost Paradol. But at this time there suddenly came 
over me a distaste for operas, theatres, dinners, society — in 
short, of crowds, gaslight, and gaiety in any form, from which 
I have never since quite recovered. I had for years been fear- 
fully overdoing it all in America, and now I was in the re- 
action, and longed for rest. I was in that state when one 
could truly say that life would be tolerable but for its amuse- 
ments. It is usual for most people to insist in such cases 
that what the sufferer needs is " excitement " and " distrac- 
tion of the mind," change of scene or gaiety, when in reality 
the patient should be most carefully trained to repose, which 
is not always easily done, for so very little attention has been 



* On due reflection, I believe that I have here had a slip of memory. 
It was not till after a year, when returning from Italy, that these inci- 
dents occurred. But as it is all strictly true in every detail, I let it 
remain, as of little consequence. 

ir 



374 MEMOIRS. 

paid to this great truth, that even medical science as yet can 
do very little towards calming nervous disorders. In most 
cases the trouble lies in the presence, or unthinking heedless 
influence, of other people ; and, secondly, in the absence of 
interesting minor occupations or arts, such as keep the mind 
busy, yet not over-excited or too deeply absorbed. An im- 
portant element in such cases is to interest deeply the patient 
in himself as a vicious subject to be subdued by his own ex- 
ertions. No one who has never had the gout severely can 
form any conception of the terribly arrogant irritability which 
accompanies it. I say arrogant^ because it is independent 
of any voluntary action of the mind. I have often felt it 
raging in me, and laughed at it, as if it were a chained wild 
beast, and conversed with perfect serenity. Unfortunately, 
even our dearest friends, generally women, cannot, to save their 
very lives and souls, refrain from having frequent piquant 
scenes with such tempting subjects ; while, on the other hand, 
the subjects are often led by mere vanity into exhibiting 
themselves as something peculiar. Altogether, I believe 
that where there is no deeply seated hereditary or congenital 
defect, or no displacement or injury from violence or disease, 
there is always a cure to be hoped for, or at least possible ; 
but this cure depends in many cases so very much upon the 
wisdom and patience of friends and physicians, that it is only 
remarkable that we find so many recoveries as we do. Where 
the patient and friends are all really persons of superior in- 
telligence, almost miraculous cures may be effected. But 
unfortunately, if it be not born in us, it requires a great deal 
of genius to acquire properly the real dolce far niente. 

From Paris we went to Spa in the Ardennes. In this 
very beautiful place, in a picturesque land of legends, I felt 
calmer and more relieved. I think it was there that for the 
first time I got an inkling that my name was becoming 
known in Europe. There was a beautiful young English 
lady whom I occasionally met in an artist's studio, who one 
day asked me with some interest whom the Leland could be 



EUROPE REVISITED. 375 

of whom one heard sometimes — " he writes books, I think." 
I told her that I had a brother who had written two or three 
clever works, and she agreed with me that he must be the 
man ; still she inclined to think that the name was not 
Henry, but Charles. 

Mr. Nicolas Triibner, whom I had not seen since 1856, 
came with his wife and daughter to Spa, and this was the 
beginning of a great intimacy which lasted to his death. 
Which meeting reminds me of something amusing. I had 
written the first third of " Breitmann as a Politician," which 
J. " Camden " Ilotten had republished, promising the public 
to give them the rest before long. This I prevented by copy- 
righting the two remaining thirds in England ! Being very 
angry at this, Hotten accused me in print of having written 
this conclusion expressly to disappoint and injure him! In 
fact, he really seemed to think that Mr. Triibner and I were 
only a pair of foreign rogues, bound together to wrong Mr. 
J. C. Hotten out of his higher rights in " Breitmann." I 
wrote a pamphlet in which I said this and some other things 
very plainly. Mr. Triibner showed this to his lawyer, who 
was of the opinion that it could not be published because it 
bore on libel, though there was nothing in it worse than what 
I have here said. However, Mr. Triibner had it privately 
printed, and took great joy, solace, and comfort for a very 
long time in reading it to his friends after dinner, or on 
other occasions, and as he had many, it got pretty w^ell about 
London. I may here very truly remark that Mr. Hotten, in 
the public controversy which he had with Mr. Triibner on 
the subject of my " Ballads," displayed an effrontery ab- 
solutely without parallel in modern times, apropos of which 
Pimch remarked — 

" The name of Curll will never be forgotten, 
And neither will be thine, John Camden Hotten." 

From Spa we went to Brussels, where I remember to have 
seen many times at work in the gallery the famous artist 



376 MEMOIRS. 

without arms who painted with his toes. What was quite as 
remarkable was the excellence of his co|)ies from Eembrandt. 
Nature succeeded in his case in " heaping voonders oopeu 
voonders," as Tom Hood says in his " Rhine." I became 
well acquainted with Tom Hood the younger in after years, 
and to this day I contribute something every year to Tom 
HoocVs Annual. At Brussels we stayed at a charming old 
hotel which had galleries one above the other round the 
courtyard, exactly like those of the White Hart Inn immor- 
talised in " Pickwick." There was in Philadelphia a perfect 
specimen of such an inn, which has of late years been rebuilt 
as the Bingham House. While in Spa I studied Walloon. 

From Brussels to Ghent, which I found much modern- 
ised from what it had been in 1847, when it was still exactly 
as in the Middle Age, but fearfully decayed, and, like Per- 
rara, literary with grass-grown streets. Unci nocli weiter — 
to Ostend, where for three weeks I took lessons in Flemish or 
Dutch from a young professor, reading " Vondel " and 
" Bilderdijk," who, if not in the world of letters known, de- 
serves to be. I had no dictionary all this time, and the 
teacher marvelled that I always knew the meaning of the 
words, which will not seem marvellous to any one who under- 
stands German and has studied Anglo-Saxon and read 
" Middle or Early English." Then back to Spa to meet Mr. 
and Mrs. Triibner and her father Octave Delepierre, who 
was a great scholar in rariora, curiosa^ and old French, and 
facile 2^Tmceps the greatest expert in Macaronic poetry who 
ever wrote. May I here venture to mention that he always 
declared that my later poem of " Breitmann and the Pope " 
was the best Macaronic poem which he had ever read ? His 
reason for this was that it was the most reckless and heedless 
or extravagant combination of Latin and modern languages 
known to him. I had, however, been much indebted to Mr. 
Oscar Browning for revising it. And so the truth, which 
long in darkness lay, nov/ comes full clearly to the light of 
day. 



EUROPE REVISITED. 37Y 

Thence to Liege, Amsterdam, the Hague, Haarlem, and 
Leyden, visiting all the great galleries and many private col- 
lections. At Amsterdam we saw the last grand kermess or 
annual fair ever held there. It was a Dutch carnival, so 
wild and extravagant that few can comprehend now to what 
extremes " spreeing " can be carried. The Dutch, Hke the 
Swedes, have or had the strange habit of bottling up their 
hilarity and letting it out on stated occasions in uproarious 
frolics. I saw cannagnoles in which men and women, seized 
by a wild impulse, whirled along the street in a frantic dance 
to any chance music, compelling every bystander to join. I 
heard of a Prince from Capua, who, having been thus car- 
magnolecl^ returned home in rags. 

In Leyden I visited the Archasological Museum, where I 
by chance became acquainted with the chief or director, who 
was then engaged in rearranging his collections, and who, 
without knowing my name, kindly expressed the wish that I 
would remain a week to aid him in preparing the catalogue. 
As there are few works on prehistoric relics which I do not 
know, and as I had for many years studied with zeal innu- 
merable collections of the kind, I venture to believe that his 
faith in my knowledge was not quite misjolaced. Even as I 
write I have just received the Catalogue of Preliistoric 
Worlcs in Eastern America^ by Cyrus Thomas — a work of 
very great importance. 

Thence we went to Cologne, where it was marvellous to 
find the Cathedral completed, in spite of the ancient legend 
which asserts that though the devil had furnished its design 
he had laid a curse upon it, declaring that it should never 
be finished. Thence up the Rhine by castles grey and smil- 
ing towns, recalling my old foot-journey along its banks; 
and so on to Heidelberg, where I stayed a month at the 
Black Eagle. Ilerr Lehr was still there. He had grown 
older. His son was taking dancing lessons of Herr Zimmer, 
who had taught me to waltz twenty years before. One day 
I took my watch to a shop to be repaired, when the proprie- 



378 MEMOIRS. 

tor declared that he had mended it once before in 1847, and 
showed me the private mark which he put on it at the time. ^ 

There were several American students, who received me 
very kindly. I remember among them AVright, Manly, and 
Overton. When I sat among them smoking and drinking 
beer, and mingling German student words with EDglish, it 
seemed as if the past twenty years were all a dream, and that 
I was a Bur sell again. Overton had the reputation of being 
par eminence the man of men in all Heidelberg, who could 
take olf a full quart at one pull without stopping to take 
breath — a feat which I had far outdone at Munich, in my 
youth, with the Jwi^n, and which I again accomplished at 
Heidelberg " without the foam," Overton himself, who was a 
very noble young fellow, applauding the feat most loudly. 
But I have since then often done it with Bass or Alsopp, 
which is much harder. I need not say that the " Breitmann 
Ballads," which had recently got among the Anglo-American 
students, and were by them greatly admired, did much to 
render me popular. 

I found or made many friends in Heidelberg. One 
night we were invited to a supper, and learned afterwards 
that the two children of our host, having heard that we were 
Americans, had peeped at us through the keyhole and ex- 
pressed great disappointment at not finding us hlaclc. 

In November we went to Dresden. We were so fortunate 
as to obtain excellent rooms and board with a Herr and 
Madame Rohn, a well-to-do couple, who, I am sure, took 
boarders far more for the sake of company than for gain. 
Herr Rohn had graduated at Leipzig, but having spent most 
of his life in Vienna, was a man of exuberant jollity — a man 
of gold and a gentleman, even as his wife was a truly gentle 
lady. As I am very tall, and detest German small beds, I 
~ complained of mine, and Herr Rohn said he had another, of 
which I could not complain. And I certainly could not, for 
w^ien it came I found it was at least eight feet in length. It 
seems that they had once had for a boarder a German baron 



EUROPE REVISITED. 379 

who was more than seven feet high, and had had this curiosity 
constructed ; and Herr Rohn roared with laughter as I gazed 
on it, and asked if I would have it lengthened. 

"We remained in Dresden till February, and found many 
friends, among whom there was much pleasant homelike 
hospitality. Among others were Julian Hawthorne and sis- 
ters, and George Parsons Lathrop. They were young fellows 
then, and not so well known as they have since become, but 
it was evident enough that they had good work in them. 
They often came to see me, and were very kind in many 
ways. I took lessons in porcelain-painting, which art I kept 
up for many years, and was, of course, assiduous in visiting 
the galleries. Green Vault, and all works of art. I became 
well acquainted with Passavant, the director. I was getting 
better, but was still far from being as mentally vigorous as I 
had been. I now attribute this to the enormous daily dose 
of bromide which I continued to take, probably mistaking 
its influeiice for the original nervous exhaustion itself. It was 
not indeed till I got to England, and substituted lupuUji in 
the form of hops — that is to say, pale ale or " bitter " — in 
generous doses, that I quite recovered. 

So we passed on to Prague, which city, like everything 
Czech, always had a strange fascination for me. There I 
met a certain Mr. Vojtech Napristek (or Adalbert Thimble), 
who had once edited in the United States a Bohemian news- 
paper with which I had exchanged, and with whom I had 
corresponded, but whom I had never before seen. He had 
established in Prague, on American lines, a Ladies' Club of 
two hundred, which we visited, and was, I believe, owing to 
an inheritance, now a prosperous man. Though I am not a 
Thimble, it also befell me, in later years, to found and pre- 
side over a Ladies' Art Club of two hundred souls. At that 
time the famous legendary bridge, with the ancient statue 
of St. John JSTepomuk, still existed as of yore. No one im- 
agined that a time would come when they would be washed 
away through sheer neglect. 



380 MExMOlRS. 

So on to Munich, where, during a whole week, I saw but 
one Riegelhauhe^ a curious head-dress or chignon-cover of 
silver thread, once very common. Even the old Bavarian dia- 
lect seemed to have almost vanished, and I was glad to hear it 
from our porter. Many old landmarks still existed, but King 
Louis no longer ran about the streets — I nearly ran against 
him once ; people no longer were obliged by law to remove 
cigars or pijDCS from their mouths when passing a sentry-box. 
Lola Montez had vanished. Mais oil sont les 7ieiges cPantan ? 

So we went over the Brenner Pass, stopped at Innspruck, 
and saw the church described by Heine in his Reisebilder, 
and came to Verona, the Bern of the Heldenhucli. " Ich will 
gen Bern ausrciten^ sprach Meister Hildebirmd.'*^ 

It was a happy thought of the Italians to put picturesque 
Verona down as the first stopping-place for Northern travel- 
lers, and I rather like Ruskin's idea of buying the town and 
keeping it intact as a piece of hric-a-hrac. He might have 
proposed Rome while he was about it; " anything there can 
be had for money," says Juvenal. 

"When we arrived at the station I alone was left to en- 
counter the fierce douaniers. One of them, inquisitive as to 
tobacco, when I told him I had none, laid his finger impres- 
sively on the mouthpiece of my pipe, remarking that where 
the tail of the fox was seen the fox could not be far off. To 
which I replied that I indeed had no tobacco, but wanted 
some very badly, and that I would be much obliged to him if 
he would give me a little to fill my pipe. So all laughed. 
My wife entering at this instant, cried in amazement, " Why, 
Charles ! where did you ever learn to talk Italian ? " Which 
shows that there can be secrets even between married people ; 
though indeed my Italian has always been of such inferior 
quality that it is no wonder that I never boasted of it even in 
confidence. It is, in fact, the Hand-organo dialect flavoured 
with Florentine. 

There was an old lady who stood at the door of a curiosity- 
shop in Verona, and she had five pieces of bone-carvings 



EUROPE REVISITED. 381 

from some old scatola or marriage-casket. She asked a 
fabulous price for them, and I offered five francs. She 
scorned the paltry sum with all the vehemence of a suscep- 
tible soul whose tenderest feelings have been outraged. So 
I went my way, but as I passed the place returning, the old 
lady came forth, and, graciously courtesying and smiling, 
held forth to me the earrings neatly wrapped in paper, and 
thanked me for the five francs ! Which indicated to me 
that the good small folk of Italy had not materially changed 
since I had left the country. 

We came to Venice, and went to a hotel, where we had 
a room given to us which, had we wished to give a ball, would 
have left nothing to be desired. I counted in it twenty-seven 
chairs and seven tables, all at such a distance from one an- 
other that they seemed not to be on speaking terms. I do 
not think I ever got quite so far as the upper end of that 
room while I inhabited it — it was probably somewhere in 
Austria. I have spoken of having met Mr. Wright at Heidel- 
berg. He was from Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania. The next 
day after my arrival I found among the names of the depart- 
ed, " Signore Wright-Ju/to, from Barre, Pennsylvania, 
America." This reminded me of the Anglo-American who 
was astonished at Eome at receiving invitations and circulars 
addressed to him as " Illustrissimo Yaranti Solezer." It 
turned out that an assistant, reading aloud to the clerk the 
names from the trunks, had mistaken a very large " War- 
EANTED Sole Leather" for the name of the owner. 

And this on soles reminds me that there was ^.femme sole 
or lone acrimonious British female at our hotel, who declared 
to me one evening that she had never in all her life been so 
insulted as she was that day at a banker's ; and the insult 
consisted in this, that she, although quite unknown to him, 
had asked him to cash a cheque on London, which he had 
declined to do. I remarked that no banker who did business 
properly ever ought to cash a cheque from a total stranger. 

" Sir," said the lady, " do I look like an impostor? " 



382 MEMOIRS. 

" Madame," I replied, " I have seen thieves and wretches 
of the vilest type who could not have been distinguished 
from either of us as regards respectability of appearance. 
You do not appear to know much about such people." 

" I am happy to say, sir," replied the lady with intense 
acidity, "that / do not.'*'* But she added triumphantly, 
" What do you say when I tell you that I had my cheque-hook ? 
How could I have possessed it if I had not a right to draw? " 

" Any scamp," I replied, " can deposit a few pounds in a 
bank, buy a cheque-book, and then draw his money." , 

But the next day she came to me in radiant sneering 
triumph. She had found another banker, who was a gentle- 
man, with a marked emphasis, who had cashed her cheque. 
How many people there are in this world whose definition of 
a gentleman is " one who does whatever pleases tis ! " 

In Florence we went directly to the Hotel d'Europe in 
the Via Tuornabuoni, where my Indian blanket vanished 
even while entering the hotel, and surrounded only by the 
servants to whom the luggage had been confided. As the 
landlord manifested great disgust for me whenever I men- 
tioned such a trifle, and as the porter and the rest declared 
that they would answer soul and body for one another's hon- 
esty, I had to grin and bear it. I really wonder sometimes 
that there are not more boarders, who, like Benvenuto Cel- 
lini, set fire to hotels or cut up the bedclothes before leaving 
them. That worthy, having been treated not so badly as I 
was at the Hotel d'Europe and at another in Florence, cut to 
pieces the sheets of his bed, galloped away hastily, and from 
the summit of a distant hill had the pleasure of seeing the 
landlord in a rage. ]N"ow people write to the Times^ and 
" cut up " the whole concern. It all comes to the same 
thing. 

In Florence I saw much of an old New York friend, the 
now late Lorimer Graham. When he died, Swinburne wrote 
a poem on him. He was a man of great culture and refined 
manner. There was something sympathetic in him which 



EUROPE REVISITED. 383 

drew every one irresistibly into liking. It was his instinct to 
be kind and thoughtful to every one. He gave me letters to 
Swinburne, Lord Houghton, and others. 

I made an acquaintance by chance in Florence whom I 
can never forget : for he was a character. One day while in 
the Uffizi Gallery engaged in studying the great Etruscan 
vase, now in the Etruscan Museum, a stranger standing by 
me said, " Does not this seem to you like a mysterious book 
written in forgotten characters? Is not a collection of such 
vases like a library ? " 

" On that hint I spake." " I see," I replied, " you refer 
to the so-called Etruscan Library which an Englishman has 
made, and which contains only vases and inscriptions in that 
now unknown tongue of Etruria. And indeed, when we 
turn over the pages of Inghirami, Gherard, and Gori, Gray, 
or Dennis, it does indeed really seem — But what do you 
really think the old Etruscan language truly was ? " 

" Look here, my friend," cried the stranger in broad 
Yankee, " I guess I'm barkin' up the wrong tree. I calcu- 
lated to tell you something, but you're ahead of me." 

We both laughed and became very good friends. He 
lived at our hotel, and had been twenty-five years in Italy, 
and knew every custode in every gallery, and could have 
every secret treasure unlocked. He was perfectly at home 
about town — would stop and ask a direction of a cab-driver, 
and was capable of going into an umbrella-shop when it 
rained. 

We went on to Rome, and I can only say that as regards 
what we saw there, my memory is confused literally with an 
emharras de richesses. The Ecumenical Council was being 
held, at which an elderly Italian gentleman, who possibly did , 
not know oxygen from hydrogen, or sin from sugar, was de- 
clared to be infallible in his judgment of all earthly things. 

While in Rome we saw a great deal of W. W. Story, the 
sculptor, and his wife and daughter, Edith, for whom 
Thackeray wrote his most beautiful tale, and I at my humble 



384 MEMOIRS. 

distance tlie ballad of " Breitmann in Rome," which con- 
tained a remarkable prophecy, of the Franco-German war. 
At their house we met Odo Russell and Oscar Browning, and 
many more whose names are known to all. It was there also 
that a lady of the Royal English household amused us very 
much one evening by narrating how the " Breitmann Bal- 
lads," owing to their odd mixture of German and English, 
were favourite subjects for mutual reading and recitation 
among the then youthful members of the Royal family, and 
what haste and alarm there was to put the forbidden book 
out of the way when Her Majesty the Queen was announced 
as coming. I also met in Rome the American poet and 
painter T. Buchanan Read, who gave me a dinner, and very 
often that remarkable character General Carroll Tevis, who, 
having fought under most flags, and been a Turkish bey or 
pacha, was now a chamberlain of the Pope. In the following 
year he fought for the French, behaved with great bravery 
in Bourbaki's retreat, and was decorated on the field of bat- 
tle. Then again, when I was in Egypt, Tevis was at the 
head of the military college. He had fairly won his rank of 
general in the American Civil War, but as there was some 
disinclination or other to give it to him, I had used my in- 
fluence in his favour with Forney, who speedily secured it 
for him. He was a perfect type of the old condottiero, 
but with Dugald Dalgetty's scrupulous faith to his mili- 
tary engagements. The American clergyman in Rome was 
the Rev. Dr. Nevin, a brother of my friend Captain Nevin. 
There was also Mrs. John Grigg, an old Philadelphia friend 
(now residing in Florence), to whom we were then, as we 
have continually been since, indebted for the most cordial 
hospitality. 

Through the kind aid of General Tevis we were enabled 
to see all the principal ceremonies of the Holy Week and 
Easter. This year, owing to the Council, everything was on 
a scale of unusual magnificence. I can say with Panurge that 
I have seen three Popes, but will not add with him, " and 



EUROPE REVISITED. 385 

little good did it ever do me," for Mrs. Leland at least was 
mucli gratified with a full sight and quasi-interview with His 
Holiness. 

There was a joyous sight for a cynic to be seen in Rome 
in those days — in fact, it was only last year (1891) that it 
was done away with. This was the drawing of the lottery by 
a priest. There was on a holy platform a holy wheel and a 
holy little boy to draw the holy numbers, and a holy old 
priest to oversee and Uess the whole precious business. The 
blessing of the devil would have been more appropriate, for 
the lotteries are the curse of Italy. What the Anglo-Ameri- 
can mechanic puts into a savings bank, the Italian invests 
in lotteries. In Naples there are now fourteen tickets sold 
per annum for the gross amount of the population, and in 
Florence twelve. 

One day I took a walk out into the country with Briton 
Riviere and some other artists. I had a cake or two of 
colour, and Riviere, with wine for water, at a trattoria where 
we lunched, made a picture of the attendant maid. He 
pointed out to me on the road a string of peasants carrying 
great loaves of coarse bread. They had walked perhajDS 
twenty miles to buy it, because in those days people were not 
allowed to bake their own bread, but must buy it at the 
public /or?zo, w^hich paid a tax for the privilege. So long as 
Rome was under Papal control, its every municipal institu- 
tion, such as hospitals, prisons, and the police, were in a 
state of absolutely incredible inhuman vileness, while under 
everything ran corruption and dishonesty. The lower or- 
ders were severely disciplined as to their sexual morals, be- 
cause it was made a rich source of infamous taxes, as it now 
is in other cities of Europe ; but cardinals and the wealthier 
priests kept mistresses, almost openly, since these women 
were pointed out to every one as they flaunted about proudly 
in their carriages. 

From Rome we passed into Pisa, Genoa, Spezzia, and 
Nice, over the old Cornici road, and so again to Paris, where 



386 MEMOIRS. 

we remained six weeks, and then left in June, 1870, just be- 
fore the war broke out. While in the city we saw at differ- 
ent times in public the Emperor and Empress, also the 
Queen of Spain. The face of Louis Napoleon was indeed 
somewhat changed since I saw him in London in 1848, but 
it had not improved so much as his circumstances, as he was 
according to external appearances and popular belief now 
extremely well off. But appearances are deceptive, as was 
soon proved, for he was in reality on the verge of a worse 
bankruptcy than even his uncle underwent, for the nephew 
lost not only kingdom and life, but also every trace of repu- 
tation for wisdom and honesty, remaining to history only as 
a brazen royal adventurer and " copper captain." 

In Rome our dear old friend Mrs. John Grigg showed us, 
as I said, many kind attentions, which she has, in Florence, 
continued to this day. This lady is own aunt to my old 
school friend General George B. McClellan. At an advanced 
age she executes without glasses the most exquisite em- 
broidery conceivable, and her heart and intellect are in keep- 
ing with her sight. 



VIII. 
ENGLAND, 

1870. 

The Trlibners — George Eliot and G. H. Lewes — Heseltine — Edwards — 
Etched by Bracquemond and Legros — Jean Ingelow — Tennyson — 
Hepworth Dixon — Lord Lytton the elder — Lord Houghton — Bret 
Harte — France, Alsace, and Lorraine — Samuel Laing — Gypsies — 
The Misses Horace Smith — Brighton and odd fish — Work and 
books — Hunting — Dore — Art and Nature — Taglioni — Chevalier 
Wykoff — Octave Delepierre — Breitmann — Thomas Carlyle — George 
Borrow — A cathedral tour round about England — Salisbury, Wells, 
and York. 

It is pleasant being anywhere in England in June, and 
the passing from picturesque Dover to London through 
laughing Kent is a good introduction to the country. The 
untravelled American, fresh from the " boundless prairies " 
and twenty-thousand-acre fields of wheat, sees nothing in it 
all but the close cultivation of limited land ; but the tourist 
from the Continent perceives at once that, with most careful 
agriculture, there are indications of an exuberance of wealth, 
true comfort, and taste rarely seen in France or Germany. 
The many trees of a better quality and slower growth than 
the weedy sprouting poplar and willow of Normandy ; the 
hedges, which are very beautiful and ever green ; the flower- 
beds and walks about the poorest cottage ; the neatly planted, 
prettily bridged side roads, all indicate a superiority of wealth 
or refinement such as prevails only in New England, or rather 
which did prevail, until the native population, going west- 
ward, was supplanted by Irish or worse, if any worse there be 
at turning neatness into dirty disorder. 



388 MEMOIRS. 

That older American population was deeply English, with 
a thousand rural English traditions religiously preserved ; 
and the chief of these is clean neatness, which, when fully 
carried out, always results in simple, unaffected beauty. This 
was very strongly shown in the Quaker gardens, once so com- 
mon in Philadelphia — and in the people. 

We arrived in London, and went directly to the Trubners', 
No. 29 Upper Hamilton Terrace, N. W. The first person 
who welcomed me was Mr. Delepierre, an idol of mine for 
years ; and the first thing I did was to borrow half-a-crov/n of 
him to pay the cab, having only French money with me. It 
was a charming house, with a large garden, so redolent of 
roses that it might have served Chriemhilda of old for a 
romance. Eor twenty years that house was destined to be an 
occasional home and a dwelling where we were ever welcome, 
and where every Sunday evening I had always an appointed 
place at dinner, and a special arm-chair for the never-failing 
Havannah. Mrs. Triibner had, in later years, two boxes of 
Havannahs of the best, which had belonged to G. H. Lewes, 
and which George Eliot gave her after his death. I have kept 
two en souvenir. I knew a man once who had formed a large 
collection of such relics. There w^as a cigar which he had 
received from Louis Napoleon, and one from Bismarck, and 
so forth. But, alas ! once while away on his travels, the whole 
museum was smoked up by a reckless under-graduate younger 
brother. In fumo exit. 

How many people well known to the world — or rather how 
few who were not — have I met there — Edwin Arnold, G. H. 
Lewes, Mrs. Triibner's uncle H. Dixon, M. Van der Weyer, 
Frith the artist. Lord Napier of Magdala, Pigott, Norman 
Lockyer, Bret Harte, " and full many more," scholars, poets, 
editors, and, withal, lady writers of every good shade, grade, 
and quality. How many of them all have passed since then 
full silently into the Silent Land, where we may follow, but 
return no more ! How many a pleasant smile and friendly 
voice and firm alliances and genial acquaintances, often carried 



ENGLAND. 3S9 

out in other lands, date their beginning in my memory to the 
house in Hamilton Terrace ! How often have I heard by land 
or sea the familiar greeting, " I think I met you once at the 
Triibners' ! " For it was a salon, a centre or sun with many 
bright and cheering rays — a civilising institution ! 

Mrs. Triibner was the life of this home. Anglo-Belgian 
by early relation and education, she combined four types in 
one. When speaking English, she struck me as the type of 
an accomplished and refined British matron ; in French, her 
whole nature seemed Parisienne ; in Flemish, she w^as alto- 
gether Flamande; and in German, Deutsch. H Cerberus 
was three gentlemen in one, Mrs. Triibner was four ladies 
united. Very well read, she conversed not only well on any 
subject, but, what is very unusual in her sex, with sincere 
interest, and not merely to entertain. If interrupted in a 
conversation she resumed the subject ! This is a remarkable 
trait ! 

The next day after our arrival Mrs. Triibner took Mrs. 
Leland, during a walk, to call on George Eliot, and that even- 
ing G. H. Lewes, Hep worth Dixon, and some others came to 
a reception at the Triibners'. Both of these men were, as 
ever, very brilliant and amusing in conversation. I met them 
very often after this, both at their homes and about London. 
I also became acquainted with George Eliot or Mrs. Lewes, 
who left on me the marked impression, which she did on all, 
of being a woman of genius, though I cannot recall anything 
remarkable which I ever heard from her. I note this because 
there were most extraordinary reports of her utterances among 
her admirers. A young American lady once seriously asked 
me if it were true that at the Sunday afternoon receptions in 
South Bank one could always see rows of twenty or thirty of 
the greatest men in England, such as Carlyle, Froude, and 
Herbert Spencer, all sitting with their note-books silently 
taking down from her lips the ideas which they subsequentl}^ 
used in their writings ! There seemed, indeed, to be afloat in 
America among certain folk an idea that something enormous. 



390 MEMOIRS. 

marvellous, and inspired went on at these receptions, and that 
George Eliot posed as a Pythia or Sibyl, as the great leading 
mind of England, and lectured while we listened. There is 
no good portrait, I believe, of her. She had long features, 
and would have been called plain but for her solemn, earnest 
eyes, which had an expression quite in keeping with her voice, 
which was one not easily forgotten. I never detected in her 
any trace of genial humour, though I doubt not that it was 
latent in her ; and I thought her a person who had drawn her 
ideas far more from books and an acquaintance with certain 
types of humanity whom she had set herself deliberately to 
study — albeit with rare perception — than from an easy intui- 
tive familiarity with all sorts and conditions of men. But 
she worked out thoroughly what she knew by the intuition of 
genius, though in this she was very far inferior to Scott. 
Thus she wrote the " Spanish G-ypsy," having only seen such 
gypsies two or three times. One day she told me that in order 
to write " Daniel Deronda," she had read through two hun- 
dred books. I longed to tell her that she had better have 
learned Yiddish and talked with two hundred Jews, and been 
taught, as I was by my friend Solomon the Sadducee, the art 
of distinguishing Friiulein Lowenthal of the Ashkenazim 
from Senorita Aguado of the Sephardim hy the C07'}iers of 
their eyes ! 

I had read more than once Lewes's " Life of Goethe," his 
" History of Philosophy and Physiology," and even " written 
him" for the Cyclopaedia. With him I naturally at once 
became well acquainted. I remember here that Mr. Eipley 
had once reproved me for declaring that Lewes had really a 
claim to be an original philosopher or thinker ; for Boston 
intellect always frowned on him after Margaret Fuller con- 
demned him as " frivolous and atheistic." I remember that 
Tom Powell had told me how he had dined somewhere in 
London, where there was a man present who had really been 
a cannibal, owing to dire stress of shipwreck, and how Lewes, 
who was there, was so fascinated with the man-eater that he 



ENGLAND. 39I 

could think of nothing else. Lewes told me that once, having 
gone with a party of archaeologists to visit a ruined church, 
he found on a twelfth-century tombstone some illegible let- 
ters which he persuaded the others to believe formed the 
name (5olxn probably having in mind the poems of Walter 
de Mapes. When I returned from Eussia I delighted him 
very much by describing how I had told the fortunes by hand 
of six gypsy girls. He declared that telling fortunes to gyp- 
sies was the very height of impudence ! 

" A hundred jests have passed between us twain, 
Which, had I space, I'd gladly tell again." 

A call which I have had, since I wrote that last line, from 
John Postle Heseltine, Esq., reminds me that he was one of 
the first acquaintances I made in London. Mr. E. Edwards, 
a distinguished etcher and painter, gave me a dinner at Rich- 
mond, at which Mr. Heseltine was present. In Edwards' 
studio I met with Bracquemond and Legros, both of whom 
etched my portrait on copper. Mr. Heseltine is well known 
as a very distinguished artist of the same kind, as well as for 
many other things. Edwards was very kind to me in many 
ways for years. Legros I found very interesting. There was 
in Edwards' studio the unique complete collection of the etch- 
ings of Meryon, which we examined. Legros remarked of 
the incredibly long-continued industry manifested in some of 
the pictures, thai? lunatics often manifested it to a high de- 
gree. Meryon, as is known, was mad. I had etched a very 
little myself and was free of the fraternity. 

Within a few days Mr. Strahan, the publisher, took me to 
Mr. (now Lord) Tennyson's reception, where I met with 
many well-known people. Among them were Lady Char- 
lotte Locker and Miss Jean Ingelow. These ladies, with 
great kindness, finding that I was married, called on Mrs. 
Leland, and invited us to dine. I became a constant visitor 
for years at Miss Ingelow's receptions, where I have met 
Ruskin, Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall (whom I had seen in 1848), 



392 MEMOIRS. 

Calverly, Edmund Gosse, Hamilton Aide, Mr. and Mrs. 
Alfred Hunt. I conversed with Tennyson, but little passed 
between ns on that occasion. I got to know him far better 
"later on." 

I here anticipate by several years two interviews which I 
had with Tennyson in 1875, who had ad interim been de- 
servedly "landed into Lordliness," and which, to him at 
least, were amusing enough to be recalled. The first was at 
a dinner at Lady Franklin's, and her niece Miss Cracrof t. 
And here I may, in passing, say a word as to the extraordinary 
kindly nature of Lady Franklin. I think it was almost as 
soon as we became acquainted that she, learning that I suf- 
fered at times from gout, sent me a dozen bottles of a kind 
of bitter water as a cure. 

There were at the dinner as guests Mr. Tennyson, Sir 
Samuel and Lady Baker, Dr. Quain, and myself. There was 
no lack of varied anecdote, reminiscences of noted people and 
of travel ; but by far the most delightful portion of it all was 
to watch the gradual unfreezing of Tennyson, and how from 
a grim winter of taciturnity, under the glowing influence of 
the sun of wine, as the Tuscan Eedi hath it — 

" Deir Indico Oriente 
Domator glorioso 11 Dio di Vino . . . 
Di quel Sol, che in del A-edete . . ." — 

he passed into a glorious summer of genial feeling. I led 
unto it thus : — My friend Professor Palmer and I had pro- 
jected a volume of songs in English Komany or Gypsy, which 
is by far the sweetest and most euphonious language in Eu- 
rope. My friend had translated " Home they brought her 
warrior dead," by Tennyson, into this tongue, and I had the 
MS. of it in my pocket. Tennyson was very much pleased 
at the compliment, and asked me to read the poem, which I 
did. The work was by permission dedicated to him. At 
last, when dinner was over, Tennyson, who had disposed of 
an entire bottle of port, rose, and approaching me, took me 



ENGLAND. 393 

gaily-gravely by both sides, as if lie would lift me up, and 
drawing himself up to his full height, said, " I like to see a 
poet a full-sized substantial man," or " tall and strong," or 
words to that effect. I replied that it was very evident from 
the general appearance of Shakespeare's bust that he was a 
very tall man, but that though the thunder of height had hit 
twice — the Poet Laureate being the second case — that I had 
been very slightly singed, tall as I was. Enfin^ some days 
after, Tennyson in a letter invited me to call and see him 
should I ever be in the Isle of Wight ; which took place by 
mere chance some time after — in fact, I did not know, when 
I was first at the hotel in Freshwater, that Tennyson lived at 
a mile's distance. 

I walked over one afternoon and sent in my card. Mr. 
Hallam Tennyson, then a very handsome young man of win- 
some manner, came out and said that his father was taking 
his usual siesta^ but begged me to remain, kindly adding, 
" Because I know, Mr. Leland, he would be very sorry to have 
missed you." After a little time, however, Tennyson himself 
appeared, and took me up to his den or studio, where I was 
asked to take a pipe, which I did with great good-will, and 
blew a cloud, enjoying it greatly, because I felt with my host, 
as with Bulwer, that we had quickly crossed acquaintanceship 
into the more familiar realm where one can talk about what- 
ever you please with the certainty of being understood and 
getting a sympathetic answer. There are lifelong friends 
with whom one never really gets to this, and there are ac- 
quaintances of an hour at taUe-cVMtes^ who " come like shad- 
ows, so depart," who talk with a touch to our hearts. Bul- 
wer and Tennyson were such to me, and apre miro zi, as the 
gypsies say — on my life-soul ! — if I had talked with them, as 
I did, without knowing who they were, I should have recalled 
them with quite as much interest as I now do, and see them 
again in dreams. And here I may add, that the common-place 
saying that literary men are rarely good talkers, and generally 
disappointing, is not at all confirmed by my experiences. 



394 MEMOIRS. 

After burning our tobacco, in Indian fashion, to better 
acquaintance (I forgot to say that the poet had two dozen clay 
pipes ranged in a small wooden rack), we went forth for 
a seven miles' walk on the Downs. And at last, from the 
summit of one, I pointed down to a small field below, and 
said 

But first I must specify that the day before I had gone 
with a young lady of fourteen summers named Bee or Bea- 
trice Fredericson, both of us bearing baskets, to pick black- 
berries for tea, and coming to a small field which was com- 
pletely surrounded by a hedge, w^e saw therein illimitable 
blackberries glittering in the setting sunlight, and longed to 
enter. Finding a gap which had been filled by a dead thorn- 
bush, I removed the latter, and, going in, we soon picked a 
quart of the fruit. But on leaving we were met by the farm- 
er, who made a to-do, charging us with trespassing. To which 
I rei^lied, " Well, what is to pay ? " He asked for two shil- 
lings, but was pacified with one ; and so we departed. 

Therefore I said to Tennyson, " I w^ent into that field yes- 
terday to pick your blackberries, and your farmer caught us 
and made me pay a shilling for tresj^assing." 

And he gravely replied, though evidently delighted — 

" Served you right! What business had you to come over 
my hedge into my field to steal my blackberries ? " 

" Afea culpa^'' I answered, " mea maxima culim!*'' 

" Mr. Leland," pursued Tennyson, as gravely as ever, 
grasping all the absurdity of the thing with evident enjoy- 
ment, " you have no idea how tourists trespass here to get at 
me. They climb over my gate and look in at my windows. 
It is a fact — one did so only last week. But I declare that 
you are the very first poet and man of letters who ever came 
here — to steal blackberries ! " Here he paused, and then 
added forcibly — 

" I do believe you are a gypsy, after all." 

Then we talked of the old manor-houses in the neighbour- 
hood, and of the famous Mortstone, a supposed Saxon rude 



ENGLAND. 395 

monolitli near by. I thought it prehistoric, because I had 
dug out from the pile of earth supporting and coeval with it 
(and indeed only with a lead-pencil) a flint flake chipped by 
hand and a bit of cannel coal, which indicate dedication. My 
host listened with great interest, and then told me a sad tale : 
how certain workmen employed by him to dig on his land had 
found a great number of old Roman bronze coins, but, instead 
of taking them to him, had kept them, though they cared so 
little for them that they gave a handful to a boy whom they 
met. " I told them," said Tennyson, " that they had been 
guilty of malappropriation, and though I was not quite sure 
whether the coins belonged to me or to the Crown, that they 
certainly had no right to them. Whereupon their leader said 
that if I was not satisfied they would not work any longer for 
me, and so they went away." I had on this occasion a long 
and interesting discussion with Mr. Tennyson relative to AYalt 
Whitman, and involving the principles or nature of poetry. 
According to the poet-laureate, poetry, as he understood it, 
consisted of elevated or refined, or at least superior thought, 
expressed in melodious form, and in this latter it seemed to 
him (for it was very modestly expressed) that Whitman was 
wanting. Wherein he came nearer to the truth than does 
Symonds, who overrates, as it seems to me, the value, as re- 
gards art and poetry, of simply equalising all human intelli- 
gences. Though I never met Symonds, there was mutual 
knowledge between us, and when I published my " Etrusco- 
Eoman Eemains in Popular Traditions," which contains the 
results of six years' intimacy with witches and fortune-tellers, 
he wrote a letter expressing enthusiastic admiration of it to 
Mr. T. Fisher Unwin. Now all three of these great men are 
dead. I shall speak of Whitman anon, for in later years for 
a lons^ time I met him almost dailv. 

I can remember that during the conversation Tennyson 
expressed himself, rather to my amazement, with some slight 
indignation at a paltry review abusing his latest work ; to 
which I replied — 



396 MEMOIRS. 

" If there is anything on earth for which I have envied 
you, even more than for your great renown as a poet, it has 
been because I supposed you were completely above all such 
attacks and were utterly indifferent to them." Which he 
took amiably, and proceeded to discuss ripe fruit and wasps 
— (X their equivalent. Yet I doubt whether I was quite in 
the right, since those who live for fame honourably acquired 
must ever be susceptible to stings, small or great. An editor 
who receives abusive letters so frequently that he ends by 
pitching them without reading into the waste-basket, and 
often treats ribald attacks in print in the same manner — as I 
have often done — has so many other affairs on his mind that 
he becomes case-hardened. But I have observed from long 
experience that there is a Nemesis who watches those who 
arrogate the right to lay on the rod, and gives it to them 
with interest in the end. 

It was very soon after my arrival in London that I was 
invited to lunch at Hepworth Dixon's to meet Lord Lytton, 
or Bulwer, the great writer. His works had been so intensely 
and sympathetically loved by me so long, that it seemed as if 
I had been asked to meet some great man of the past. I 
found him, as I expected, quite congenial and wondrous 
kind. I remember a droll incident. Standing at the head 
of the stairs, he courteously made way and asked me to go 
before. I replied, " When Louis XIV. asked Crillon to do 
the same, Crillon complied, saying, ' Wherever your Majesty 
goes, be it before or behind, is always the first place or post 
of honour,' and I say the same with him," and so went in ad- 
vance at once. I saw by his expression that he was pleased 
with the quotation. 

We were looking at a portrait of Shakespeare which 
Dixon had found in Russia. Lord Lytton asked me if I 
thought it an original or true likeness. I observed that the 
face was full of many fine seamy lines, which infallibly in- 
dicate great nervous genius of the highest order — noting at 
the same time that Lord Lytton's countenance was very much 



ENGLAND. 397 

marked in a like manner. The observation was new to him, 
and he seemed to be interested in it, as he always was in 
anything like chiromancy or metoscopy. A few days later I 
was invited to come and pass nearly a week with Hepworth 
Dixon at Knebworth, Lord Lytton's country seat. It is a 
very picturesque chateau^ profusely adorned with fifteenth- 
century Gothic grotesques, with a fine antique hall, stained 
glass windows, and gallery. There is in it a chamber contain- 
ing a marvellous and massive carved oak bedstead, the posts 
of which are human figures the size of life, and in it and in 
the same room Queen Elizabeth is said to have slept when 
she heard of the destruction of the Spanish Armada. It was 
the room of honour, and it had been kindly assigned to me. 
It all seemed like a dream. 

There w^as in the family of the late Lord Lytton his son, 
who made a most favourable impression on me. I think the 
first coup was my finding that he knew the works of An- 
dreini, and that it had occurred to him as well as to me that 
Euphues Lily's book had been modelled on them. There 
was also his wife, a magnificent and graceful beauty ; Lord 
Lytton's nephew, Mr. Bulwer ; and several ladies. The first 
morning we all fished in the pond, and, to my great amaze- 
ment. Lord Lytton pulled out a great one-eyed 'perch I I 
almost expected to see him pull out Paul Clifford or Zanoni 
next ! In the afternoon we were driven out to Cowper Cas- 
tle to see a fine gallery of pictures, our host acting as cice- 
rone, and as he soon found that I was fairly well educated in 
art, and had been a special pupil of Thiersch in Munich, and 
something more than an amateur, we had many interesting 
conversations. I think I may venture to say that he did not 
expect to find a whilom student of Eesthetics, art-history, and 
philosophy in the author of " Hans Breitmann." What was 
delightful was his exquisite tact in never saying as much ; 
but I could detect it in the sudden interest and involuntary 
compliment implied in his tone o;f conversation. In a very 

short time he began to speak to me, on all literary or artistic 
18 



398 MEMOIRS. 

subjects without preliminary question, taking it for granted 
that I understood them and chimed in with him. I was with 
every interview more and more impressed with his culture 
— I mean with what had resulted from his reading — his 
marvellous tact of kindness in small things to all, and 
his quick and vigorous comparing and contrasting of images 
and drawing conclusions. But there was evidently enough 
a firm bed-rock or hard pan nnder all this gold. I was 
amazed one day when a footman, who had committed 
some levue or blunder, or apprehended something, actu- 
ally turned pale and stammered with terror when Lord 
Lytton gravely addressed a question to him. I never in 
my life saw a man so much frightened, even before a re- 
volver. 

But Lord Lytton was beyond all question really interested 
when he found me so much at home in Eosicrucian and oc- 
cult lore, and that I had been with Justinus Kerner in 
"VYeinsberg, and was familiar with the forgotten dusky paths 
of mysticism. He had in his house the famous Earl Stan- 
hope crystal, and wished me to sleep with it under my pillow, 
but I was so afraid lest the precious relic should be injured, 
that I resolutely declined the honour, for which I am now 
sorry, for I sometimes have dreams of a most extraordinary 
character. This Stanhope crystal is not, however, the great 
mirror of Dr. Dee, though it has been said to be so. The 
latter belonged to a gentleman in London, who also offered 
to lend it to me. It is made of cannel coal. That Lord 
Lytton made a very remarkable impression on me is proved 
by the fact that I continued to dream of him at long inter- 
vals after his death ; and I am quite sure that such feeling 
is, by its very nature, always to a certain slight degree recip- 
rocal. He had a natural and unaffected voice, yet one with 
a marked character ; something like Tennyson's, which was 
even more striking. Both were far removed from the now 
fashionable intonation, which is the admiration and despair 
of American swells. It is only i\\Qfin de siecle form of the 



ENGLAND. 399 

demnition dialect of the Forties and the La-ard and Lunnon 
of an earlier age. 

Lord Lytton was generally invisible in the morning, 
sometimes after lunch. In the evening he came out splen- 
didly groomed, fresh as a rose, and at dinner and after was 
as interesting as any of his books. He had known " every- 
body " to a surprising extent, and had anecdotes fresh and 
vivid of every one whom he had met. He loved music, and 
there was a lady who sang old Spanish ballads with rare taste. 
I enjoyed myself incredibly. 

I may be excused for mentioning here that I sent a copy 
of the second edition of my " Meister Karl's Sketch-Book " 
to Lord Lytton. IS'o one but L'ving and Triibner had ever 
praised it. When Lord Lytton published afterwards " Ken- 
elm Chillingly," I found in it three passages in which I recog- 
nised beyond dispute others suggested by my own work. I 
do not in the least mean that there was any borrowing or 
taking beyond the mere suggestion of thought. Why I think 
that Lord Lytton had these hints in his mind is that he gave 
the name of Leland to one of the minor characters in the 
book. 

When I published a full edition of " Breitmann's Poems," 
he wrote me a long letter criticising and praising the work, 
and a much longer and closely written one, of seven pages, 
relating to my " Confucius and Other Poems." I was sub- 
sequently invited to receptions at his house in London, where 
I first met Browning, and had a long conversation with him. 
I saw him afterwards at Mrs. Proctor's. This was the wife 
of Barry Cornwall, whom I also saw. He was very old and 
infirm. I can remember when the " Cornlaw Ehymes " rang 
wherever English was read. 

As I consider it almost a duty to record what I can re- 
member of Bulwer, I may mention that one evening, at his 
house in London, he showed me and others some beautiful 
old brass salvers in repousse work, and how I astonished him 
by describing the process, and declaring that I could produce 



400 MEMOIRS. 

a facsimile of any one of them in a day or two ; to which 
assertion hundreds to whom I have taught the art, as well as 
my " Manual of Eepousse," and another on " Metal Work," 
will, I trust, hear witness. And this I mention, not vainly, 
but because Lord Lytton seemed to be interested and pleased, 
and because, in after years, I had much to do with reviving 
the practice of this beautiful art. It was practising this, and 
a three years' study of oak-wood carving, which led me to 
write on the Minor Arts. Mihi ms et triplex rohur. 

Lord Lytton had the very curious habit of making almost 
invisible hieroglyphics or crosses in his letters — at least I 
found them in those to me, as it were for luck. It was a 
very common practice from the most ancient Egyptian times 
to within two centuries. Lord Lytton's were evidently in- 
tended to escape observation. But there was indeed a great 
deal in his character which would escape most persons, and 
which has not been revealed by any writer on him. This I 
speedily divined, though, of course, I never discovered what 
it all was. 

Lord Houghton, " Richard Monckton Milnes," to whom 
I had a letter of introduction from Lorimer Graham, was 
very kind to me. I dined and lunched at his house, where 
i met Odo Russell or Lord Ampthill, the Duke of Bedford, 
the Hon. Mrs. Norton, W. W. Story, and I know not how 
many more distinguished in society, or letters. At Lord 
Lytton's I made the acquaintance of the Duke of Wellington. 
I believe, however, that this meeting with Lord Houghton 
and the Duke was in my second year in London. 

The first Euglish garden-party which I ever attended was 
during this first season, at the villa of Mr. Bohn, the pub- 
lisher, at Twickenham. There I made the acquaintance of 
George Cruikshank, whom I afterwards met often, and knew 
very well till his death. He was a gay old fellow, and on 
this occasion danced a jig with old Mr. Bohn on the lawn, 
and joked with me. There, too, we met Lady Martin, who 
had been the famed Helen Faucit. Cruikshank was always 



ENGLAND. 401 

inexhaustible in jokes, anecdotes, and reminiscences. At his 
house I made the acquaintance of Miss Ada Cavendish. 

To revert to Mr. Triibner's, I may say that one evening 
after dinner, when, genial though quiet, Bret Harte was one 
of the guests, he was asked to repeat the " Heathen Chinee," 
which he could not do, as he had never learned it — w^hnch is 
not such an unusual thing, by the way, as many suppose. 
But I, who knew it, remarked, " Ladies and gentlemen, it is 
nothing to merely write a poem. True genius consists in 
getting it by or from heart [from Bret Harte, for instance], 
and repeating it. This genius nature has denied to the 
illustrious poet before you — but not to me, as I will now 
illustrate by declaiming the ' Heathen Chinee.' " Which 
performance was received with applause, in which Harte 
heartily joined. But my claim to possess genius would hard- 
ly have borne examination, for it was years before I ever 
learned " Hans Breitmann's Barty," nor would I like to risk 
even a pound to one hundred that I can do it now without 
mixing the verses or committing some error. 

Once during the season I v/ent with my wife and Mr. 
"W. W. Story to Eton, where we supped with Oscar Browning. 
We were taken out boating on the river, and I enjoyed it 
very much. There is a romance about the Thames asso- 
ciated with a thousand passages in literature which goes to 
the very heart. I was much impressed by the marked char- 
acter of Mr. Browning and his frank, genial nature ; and I 
found some delightful old Latin books in his library. May 
I meet with many such men ! 

This year, what with the German war and the Triibner- 
Hotten controversy, my " Breitmann Ballads " had become, I 
may say, well known. The character of Hans was actually 
brought into plays on three stages at once. Boucicault, 
whom I knew well of yore in America, introduced it into 
something. I had found Ewan Colquhoun — the same old 
sixpence — and one night he took me to the Strand Theatre 
to see a play in which my hero vras a prominent part. I was 



402 MEMOIRS. 

told afterwards that the company having been informed of 
my presence, all came to look at me through the curtain-hole. 
There were some imitations of my ballads published in Punch 
and the Standard, and the latter were so admirably executed 
pardon the vain word ! — that I feared, because they satir- 
ised the German cause, that they might be credited to me ; 
therefore I wrote to the journal, begging that the author 
would give some indication that I had not written them, 
which was kindly done. Finally, a newspaper was started 
called Hayis Breitmami, and the Messrs. Cope, of Liverpool, 
issued a brand of Hans Breitmann cigars. Owing to the 
resemblance between the words Bret and Breit there was a 
confusion of names, and my photograph was to be seen about 
town, with the name of Bret Harte attached to it. This 
great injustice to Mr. Harte was not agreeable, and I, or my 
friends, remonstrated with the shop-folk with the to-be-ex- 
pected result, " Yes-sir, yes-sir — very sorry, sir — we'll correct 
the mistake, sir ! " But I don't think it was ever corrected 
till the sale ceased. 

I was sometimes annoyed with many imitations of my 
poems by persons who knew no German, which were all 
attributed to me. A very pious Presbyterian publication, in 
alluding to something of the kind, said that " Mr. Leland, 
lecause lie is the author of Bret Harte, thinks himself justified 
in publishing any trash of this description." I thought this 
a very improper allusion for a clergyman, not to say libellous. 
In fact, many people really believed that Bret Harte was a 
nom de lilume or the title of a poem. And I may here say 
by the way that I never " wrote under " the pseudonym of 
Hans Breitmann in my life, nor called myself any such name 
at any time. It is simply the name of one of many hoolcs 
which I have written. An American once insisting to me 
that I should be called so from my work, I asked him if he 
would familiarly accost Mr. Lowell as "Josh Biglow." If 
there is anything in the world which denotes a subordinate 
position in the social scale or defect in education, it is the 



ENGLAND. 403 

passion to call men " out of their names," and never feel 
really acquainted with any one until he is termed Tom or 
Jack. It is doubtless all very genial and jocose and sociable, 
but the man who shows a tendency to it should not complain 
when his betters put him in a lower class or among the 
" lower orders." 

Once at a reception at George Boughton's, the artist, 
there was, as I heard, an elderly gentleman rushing about 
asking to see or be introduced to Hart Bretmann^ whose 
works he declared he knew by heart, and with whom he was 
most anxious to become acquainted. Whether he ever dis- 
covered this remarkable conglomerate I do not know. 

I once made the acquaintance of an American at the 
Langham Hotel who declared that I had made life a burden 
to him. His name was H. Brightman, and being in business 
in New York, he never went to the Custom-House or Post- 
Office but what the clerks cried " Hans Brightman ! of course. 
Yes, we have read about you, sir — in history." 

But even in this London season I found more serious 
work to attend to than comic ballads or society. Mr. Trlibner 
was very anxious to have me write a pamphlet vindicating 
the claim of Germany to Alsace and Lorraine, and I offered 
to do it gladly, if he would provide all the historical data 
or material. The result of this was the hrocliure entitled 
" France, Alsace, and Lorraine," which had a great success. 
It at once reappeared in America, and even in Spanish in 
South America. The German Minister in London ordered 
six copies, and the Times made the work, with all its facts 
and figures, into an editorial article, omitting, I regret to say, 
to mention the source whence it was derived ; but this I for- 
give with all my heart, considering the good words which it 
has given me on other occasions. For the object of the work 
was not at all to glorify the author, but to send home great 
truths at a very critical time ; and the article in the Times^ 
which was little else but my pamphlet condensed, caused a 
great sensation. But the principal result from it was this : 



4:04 MEMOIRS. 

I had in the work discussed the idea, then urged by the 
French and their friends, that, to avoid driving France to 
" desperation," very moderate terms should be accepted in 
order to conciliate. For the French, as I observed in eJBfect, 
will do their very ivorst in any case^ and eveij possible ex- 
treme should be anticipated and assumed. This same argu- 
ment had previously been urged in my " Centralisation versits 
States Rights." 

When Prince Bismarck conversed with the French Com- 
missioners to arrange terms of peace, he met this argument 
of not driving the French to extremes with a phrase so closely 
like the one which I had used in my pamphlet, that neither 
Mr. Triibner nor several others hesitated to declare to me 
that it was beyond all question taken from it. Bismarck 
had certainly received the pamphlet, which had been rec- 
ognised by the Times, and in many other quarters, as a 
more than ordinary paper, and Prince Bismarck, like all great 
diplomatists, prend son Men oil il le troiive. In any case this 
remains true, that that which formed the settling argument of 
Germany, found at the time expression in my pamphlet and 
in the Chancellor's speech. 

We made soon after a visit to the Rev. Dean and Mrs. 
Carrington, in Booking, Essex. They had a fair daughter, 
Eva, then quite a girl, who has since become well known as 
a writer, and is now the Countess Cesaresco Martinengro — 
an Italian name, and not Romany-Gypsy, as its terminations 
would seem to indicate. There is in the village of Booking, 
at a corner, a curious and very large grotesque figure of oak, 
which was evidently in the time of Elizabeth a pilaster in some 
house-front. My friend Edwards, who was wont to roam all 
over England in a mule-waggon etching and sketching, when 
in Booking was informed by a rustic that this figure was the 
image of Harkiles (Hercules), a heathen god formerly wor- 
shipped in the old Catholic convent upon the hill, in the old 
times ! 

From London we went in August, 18T0, to Brighton, stay- 



ENGLAND. 405 

ing at first at the Albion Hotel. There, under the influence 
of fresh sea-air, long walks and drives in all the country 
round, I began to feel better, yet it was not for many weeks 
tliat I fairly recovered. A chemist named Phillips, who 
supplied me with bromide of potass, suggested to me, to his 
own loss, that I took a great deal too much. I left it oS 
altogether, substituting pale ale. Finding this far better, I 
asked Mr. Phillips if he could not prepare for me lupuUn^ or 
the anodyne of hops. He laughed, and said, " Do you find 
the result required in ale ? " I answered, " Yes." " And do 
you like ale ? " " Yes." " Then," he answered, " why don't 
you drink ale ? " And I did, but before I took it up my 
very vitality seemed to be well-nigh exhausted with the 
bromide. 

Samuel Laing, M. P., the chairman of the Brighton Eail- 
way, had at that time a house in Brighton, with several sons 
and daughters, the latter of whom have all been very re- 
markable for beauty and accomplishments. In this home 
there was a hospitality so profuse, so kind, so brilliant and 
refined, that I cannot really remember to have ever seen it 
equalled, and as we fully participated in it at all times in every 
form, I should feel that I had omitted the deepest claim to 
my gratitude if I did not here acknowledge it. Mr. Laing 
was or is of a stock which deeply appealed to my sympathies, 
for he is the son of the famous translator of the Heims- 
kringla^ a great collection of ^orse sagas, which I had read, 
and in which he himself somewhat aided. Of late years, 
since he has retired from more active financial business, Mr. 
Laing has not merely turned his attention to literature ; he 
has deservedly distinguished himself by translating, as I may 
say, into the clearest and most condensed or succinct and 
lucid English ever written, so as to be understood by the 
humblest mind, the doctrines of Darwin, Huxley, and the 
other leading scientific minds of the day. Heine in his time 
received a great deal of credit for having thus acted as the 
flux and furnace by which the ore of German philosophy was 



406 MEMOIRS. 

smelted into pure gold for general circulation ; but I, who 
have translated all that Heine wrote on this subject, declare 
that he was at such work as far inferior to Samuel Laing as 
a mere verbal description of a beautiful face is inferior to a 
first-class portrait. This family enters so largely into my 
reminiscences and experiences, that a chapter would hardly 
suffice to express all that I can recall of their hospitality for 
years, of the dinners, hunts, balls, excursions, and the many 
distinguished people whom I have met under their roof. It 
is worth noting of Mr. Laing's daughters, that Mary, now 
Mrs. Kennard, is at the head of the sporting-novel writers ; 
that the beautiful Cecilia, now Mrs. MacRae, was pronounced 
by G. H. Lewes, who was no mean judge, to be the first 
amateur pianiste in England ; while the charming " Floy," 
or Mrs. Kennedy, is a very able painter. With their two 
very pretty sisters, they formed in 1870 as brilliant, beau- 
tiful, and accomplished a quintette as England could have 
produced. 

One day Mr. Laing organised an excursion with a special 
train to Arundel Castle. By myself at other times I found 
my way to Lewes and other places rich in legendary lore. 
Of this latter I recall something worth telling. Harold, the 
conquered Saxon king, had a son, and the conqueror William 
had a daughter, Gundrada. The former became a Viking 
pirate, and in his old age a monk, and was buried in a 
church, now a Presbyterian chapel. There his epitaph may 
be read in fine bold lettering, still distinct. That man is 
dear to me. 

Gundrada married, died, and was buried in a church 
with a fine Norman tombstone over her remains. The 
church was levelled with the ground, but the slab was pre- 
served here and there about Lewes as a relic. When the 
railway was built, about 1849, there was discovered, where 
the church had been, the bones of Gundrada and her husband 
in leaden coffins distinctly inscribed with their names. A 
very beautiful Norman chapel was then built to receive the 



ENGLAND. 407 

coffins, and over them is placed the original memorial in 
black marble. There is also in Lewes an archaeological mu- 
seum appropriately bestowed in an old Gothic tower. All 
of which things did greatly solace me. As did also the Nor- 
man or Gothic churches of Shoreham, Newport, the old 
manor of Eottingdean, and the marvellous Devil's Dyke, 
which was probably a Roman fort, and from which it is 
said that fifty towns or villages may be seen "far in the 
blue." 

One day I went with my wife and two ladies to visit the 
latter. The living curiosity of the place was a famous old 
gypsy woman named Gentilla Cooper, a pure blood or real 
Kalorat Romany. I had already in America studied Pott's 
" Thesaurus of Gypsy Dialects," and picked up many phrases 
of the tongue from the works of Borrow, Simson, and others. 
The old dame tackled us at once. As soon as I could, I 
whispered in her ear an improvised rhyme : — 

" The bashno and kani, 
The rve and the rani, 
Ilav'd akai 'pre o boro Ion pani." 

Which means that the cock and the hen, the gentleman 
and the lady, came hither across the great salt water. The 
effect on the gypsy was startling; she fairly turned pale. 
Hustling the ladies away to one side to see a beautiful view, 
she got me alone and hurriedly exclaimed, " Rya — master ! 
ie you one of our people ? " with much more. We became 
very good friends, and this little incident had in time for me 
great results, and many strange experiences of gypsy life. 

There live in Brighton two ladies. Miss Horace Smith 
and her sister Rosa, who were and are well known in the 
cultured world. They are daughters of Horace Smith, who, 
with his brother James, wrote the " Rejected Addresses." 
Their reminiscences of distinguished men are extremely 
varied and interesting. The elder sister possesses an album 
to which Thackeray contributed many verses and pen- 



40S MEMOIRS. 

sketches. Their weekly receptions were very pleasant ; at 
them might be seen most of the literary or social celebrities 
who came to Brighton. A visit there was like living a 
chapter in a book of memoirs and reminiscences. I have 
had, if it be only a quiet, and not very eventful or remark- 
able, at least a somewhat varied life, and the Laings and 
Smiths, with their surroundings, form two of its most inter- 
esting varieties. I believe they never missed an opportunity 
to do us or any one a kindly act, to aid us to make congenial 
friends, or the like. How many good people there really are 
in the world ! 

Of these ladies the author of " Gossip of the Century " 
writes : — 

" Horace Smith's two daughters are still living, and in 
Brighton. Their very pleasant house is frequented by the 
best and most interesting kind of society, affording what may 
be called a salo?i, that rare relic of ancient literary taste and 
cementer of literary intimacies — a salon which the cultivated 
consider it a privilege to frequent, and where these ladies re- 
ceive with a grace and geniality which their friends know 
how to appreciate. It is much to be regretted that gather- 
ings of this description seem to be becoming rarer every year, 
for as death disturbs them society seems to lack the spirit or 
the good taste, or the ability, to replace them." 

Brighton is a very pleasant place, because it combines the 
advantages of a seaside resort with those of a clean and 
cheerful city. Walking along the front, you have a brave 
outlook to the blue sea on one hand, and elegant shop-win- 
dows and fine hotels on the other. A little back in the town 
on a hill is the fine old fifteenth-century church of St. 
Nicholas, in which there is perhaps the most curious carved 
Norman font in England ; but all this is known to so few 
visitors, that I feel as if I were telling a great secret in letting 
it out. Smith's book-store on the Western Eoad, and Bohn's 
near the station, are kept by very well-informed and very 
courteous men. I have been much indebted to the former 



ENGLAND. 409 

in many ways, and found by his aid many a greatly needed 
and rare work. 

When I first went to Brighton there was one evening a 
brilliant aurora borealis. As I looked at it, I heard an Eng- 
lishman say, to my great amazement, it was the first time he 
had ever seen one in his life ! I once saw one in America of 
such extraordinary brilliancy and duration, that it prolonged 
the daylight for half an hour or more, till I became amazed, 
and then found it was a Northern Light. It lasted till sun- 
rise in all its splendour. I have taken down from Algonkin 
Indians several beautiful legends relating to them. In one, 
the Milky Way is the girdle of a stupendous deity, and the 
Northern Lights the splendid gleams emitted by his ball 
when playing. In another, the narrator describes him as 
clad in an ineffable glory of light, and in colours unknown 
on earth ! 

And this reminds me further that I have just read in the 
newspapers of the death of Edwin Booth, vrho was born 
during the famous star shower of 1833, which phenomenon I 
witnessed from beginning to end, and remember as if it were 
only yesterday. Now, I was actually dreamiug that I was in 
a room in which cigars were flying about in every direction, 
when my father came and woke me and my brother Henry, 
to come and see an exceeding great marvel. There were for a 
long time many thousands of stars at once in the sky, all shoot- 
ing, as it were, or converging towards a centre. They were 
not half so long as the meteors which we see ; one or two had 
acrook or bend in the middle {e.g.^ ■ i,,, i'*'**»^^^^^ ^ ^^ *\. 
The next day I was almost alone at school in the glory of 
having seen it, for so few people were awake in sober Phila- 
delphia at three in the morning that one of the newspapers 
ridiculed the whole story. 

I can distinctly recall that the next day, at Mr. Alcott's, 
I read through a very favourite work of mine, a translation 
of the German Das Mdlirclien oline Encle — " The Story with- 
out an End." 



410 MEMOIRS. 

All kinds of odd fish came to Brighton, floating here and 
there ; but two of the very oddest were encountered by me 
in it on my last visit. I was looking into a chemist's win- 
dow, when two well-dressed and decidedly jolly feminines, 
one perhaps of thirty years, and the other much younger and 
quite prett}^, paused by me, while the elder asked — 

"Are you looking for a hair-restorer?" 

" I am not, though I fear I need one much more than 
you do." 

" The search for a good hair-restorer," she replied in 
Italian, " is as vain as the search for happiness." 

" True," I answered in the same tongue, " and unless you 
have the happiness in you, or a beautiful head of hair like 
yours already growing on you, you will find neither." 

" What we/or^e/," added the younger in Spanish, " is the 
best part of our happiness." 

" Senorita^ parece que no ha olvidado sti Espanol " — The 
young lady appears not to have forgotten her Spanish — I 
replied. (Mine is not very good.) 

" There is no use asking whether you talk French," said 
the elder. " Konnen Sie audi Deutsch spreclien 9 " 

" Jrt wolil! Even worse than German itself," I answered. 

Just then there came up to us a gypsy girl whom I knew, 
with a basket of flowers, and asked me in Gypsy to buy some ; 
but I ^iiidi^'-'-Parraco pen^jd vrl^ mandy hams hek ruzliia 
Icedivvus " — Thank you, sister, no flowers to-day — and she 
darted away. 

" Did you understand that 9 " I inquired. 

" No ; what was it ? " 

" Gitano — gypsy." 

" But how in Heaven's name," cried the girl, " could she 
kjioiv that you spoke Gitano ? " 

" Because I am," I replied slowly and grimly, " the chief 
of all the gypsies in England, the horo Romany rye and Presi- 
dent of the Gypsy Society. Subscription one pound per 
annum, which entitles you to receive the journal for one year, 



ENGLAND. 411 

and includes postage. Behold in me the gypsy king, whom 
all know and fear ! I shall be happy to put your names down 
as subscribers." 

At this appalling announcement, which sounded like an 
extract from a penny dreadful, my two romantic friends 
looked absolutely bewildered. They seemed as if they had 
read in novels how mysterious gypsy chiefs cast aside their 
cloaks, revealing themselves to astonished maidens, and as I 
had actually spoken Gitano to a gypsy in their hearing, it 
must be so. They had come for wool with all their languages, 
poor little souls ! and gone back shorn. The elder said some- 
thing about their having just come to Brighton for six hours' 
frolic, and so they departed. They had had their spree. 

I have often wondered what under the sun they could 
have been. Attaches of an opera company — ladies'-maids 
who had made the grand tour — who knows ? A mad world, 
my masters ! 

I can recall of that first year, as of many since at Brighton, 
long breezy walks on the brow of the chalk cliffs, looking out 
at the blue sea white capped, or at the downs rolling inland 
to Newport, sometimes alone, at times in company. On all 
this chalk the grass does not grow to more than an inch or 
so in length, and as the shortest, tenderest food is best for 
sheep, it is on this that they thrive — I believe by millions — 
yielding the famous South Downs mutton. In or on this 
grass are incredible numbers of minute snails, which the 
sheep are said to devour ; in fact, I do not see how they could 
eat the grass without taking them in, and these contribute to 
give the mutton its delicate flavour. Snails are curious beings. 
Being epicene, they conduct their wooings on the mutual 
give and take principle, which would save human beings a 
great deal of spasmodic flirtation, and abolish the whole /<???ime 
incomprise business, besides a great many bad novels, if we 
could adopt it. When winter comes, half-a-dozen of them 
retire into a hole in a bank, connect themselves firmly into a 
loving band like a bunch of grapes by the tenderest ties, and 



412 MEMOIRS. 

stay there till spring. Finally, in folk-lore the snail is an 
uncanny or demoniac being, because it has horns. Its shell 
is an amulet, and the presentation of one by a lady to a gen- 
tleman is a very decided declaration of love, especially in 
Germany. Seel mittamus lime. 

At this time, and for some time to come, I was engaged 
in collecting and correcting a book of poems of a more serious 
character than the " Breitmann Ballads." This was "The 
Music Lesson of Confucius and other Poems." Of which 
book I can say truly that it had a succes d^estime, though it 
had a very small sale. There were in it ten or twelve ballads 
only which were adapted to singing, and all of these were set 
to music by Carlo Pinsutti, Virginia Gabriel, or others. There 
was in it a poem entitled " On Mount Meru." In this the 
Creator is supposed to show the world when it was first made 
to Satan. The adversary finds that all is fit and well, save 
" the being called Man," who seems to him to be the worst 
and most incongruous. To which the Demiurgiis replies 
that Man will in the end conquer all things, even the devil 
himself. And at the last the demon lies dying at the feet of 
God, and confesses that " Man, thy creature hath vanquished 
me for ever — Vicisti OaJilcee I " Some years after I read a 
work by a French writer in which this same idea of God and 
the devil is curiously carried out and illustrated by the his- 
tory of architecture. And as in the case of the letter from 
Lord Lytton Bulwer, warm praise from other persons of high 
rank in the literary world and reviews, I had many proofs 
that these poems had made a favourable impression. The 
only exception which I can recall was a very sarcastic review 
in the AtliencBum^ in which the writer declared his belief 
that the poems or Legends of Perfumes in the book were 
originally written as advertisements of some barber or trades- 
man, and being by him rejected as worthless, had been thrown 
back on my hands ! Other works by me it treated kindly 
— so it goes in this world — like a recipe for a cement 
which I have just copied into my great work on " Mend- 



ENGLAND. 413 

ing and Eepairing" — in which vinegar is combined with 



sugar. 



While at Brighton we met Louis Blanc, whom we had 
previously seen several times at the Triibners', in London. In 
Brighton he heard the news of the overthrow of the Empire 
and departed for Paris. At Christmas we went to London 
to visit the Triibners, and thence to the Langham Hotel, 
where we remained till July. I recall very little of what I 
witnessed or did beyond seeing the Queen prorogue Parlia- 
ment and translating Scheffel's Gaudeamus^ a little volume 
of German humorous poems. Scheffel, as I have before 
written, was an old Mithneipant^ or evening-beer companion 
of mine in Heidelberg. 

In July we made up a travelling party with Mrs. S. Laing 
and her daughters Cecilia and Floy, and departed for a visit 
to the Rhine — that is to say, these ladies preceded us, and we 
joined them at the Hotel des Quatre Saisons in Homburg. It 
was a very brilliant season, for the German Emperor, fresh 
with the glory of his great victory, was being feted every- 
where, and Homburg the brilliant was not behind the Ger- 
man world in this respect. I saw the great man frequently, 
near and far, and was much impressed with his appearance. 
Punch had not long before represented him as Hans Breit- 
mann in a cartoon, deploring that he had not squeezed more 
milliards out of the French, and I indeed found in the origi- 
nal very closely my ideal of Hans, who always occurs to me 
as a German gentleman, who drinks, fights, and plunders, 
not as a mere rowdy, raised above his natural sphere, but as 
a rough cavalier. And that the great-bearded giant Emperor 
Wilhelm did drink heavily, fight hard, and mulct France 
mightily, is matter of history. This was the last year of the 
gaming-tables at Homburg. Apropos of these, the roulette- 
table was placed in the Homburg Museum, where it may be 
seen amid many Roman relics. Two or three years ago, while 
I was in the room, there came in a small party of English or 
Yankee looking or gazing tourists, to whom the attendant 



414 MEMOIRS. 

pointed out the roulette-table. " And did the old Romans 
really play at roulette, and was that one of their tables?" 
said the leader of the visitors. This ready simple faith indi- 
cates the Englishman. The ordinary American is always 
possessed with the conviction that everything antique is a 
forgery. Once when I was examining the old Viking armour 
in the Museum of Copenhagen, a Yankee, in whose face a 
general vulgar distrust of all earthly things was strongly 
marked, came up to me and asked, " Do you believe that all 
these curiosities air genooine ? " " I certainly do," I replied. 
With an intensely self-satisfied air he rejoined, " I guess you 
can't fool me with no such humbug." 

There was a great deal of cholera that year in Germany, 
and I had a very severe attack of it either in an incipient 
form or something thereunto allied : suffice it to say that for 
twelve hours I almost thought I should die of pure pain. I 
took in vain laudanum, cayenne pejDper, brandy, camphor, 
and kino — nothing would remain. At last, at midnight, 
when I was beginning to despair, or just as I felt like being 
wrecked, I succeeded in keeping a little weak laudanum and 
water on my stomach, and then the point was cleared. After 
that I took the other remedies, and was soon well. But it was 
a crisis of such fearful suffering that it all remains vividly im- 
pressed on my memory. I do not know whether any sensible 
book has ever been written on the moral influence of pain, but 
it is certain that a wonderful one might be. So far as I can 
understand it, I think that in the vast majority of cases it is 
an evil, or one of Nature's innumerable mistakes or diva- 
gations, not as yet outgrown or corrected ; and it is the great 
error of Buddhistic-Christianity that it accepts pain not 
merely as inevitable, but glorifies and increases it, instead of 
making every conceivable exertion to diminish it. Herein 
clearly lies the difference between Science and Religion. Sci- 
ence strives in every way to alleviate pain and suffering ; errone- 
ous " Religion " is based on it. During the Middle Ages, the 
Church did all in its power to hinder, if not destroy, the 



ENGLAND. 4I5 

healing art. It made anatoiii}^ of the human body a crime, 
and carried its precautions so far that, quite till the Reforma- 
tion, the art of healing (as Paracelsus declares) was chiefly in 
the hands of witches and public executioners. Torturers^ 
chiefly clergymen such as Grillandus, were in great honour, 
while the healing leech was disreputable. It was not, as 
people say, " the age " which caused all this — it was the result 
of religion based on crucifixion and martyrdoms and pain — in 
fact, on that element of torture which we are elsewhere 
taught, most inconsistently, is the special province of the 
devil in hell. The cant of this still survives in Longfellow's 
" Suffer and be strong," and in the pious praise of endur- 
ance of pain. What the world wants is the hope held out to 
it, or enforced on it as a religion or conviction, that pain and 
suffering are to be diminished, and that our chief duty should 
consist in diminishing them, instead of always praising or 
worshipping them as a cross ! 

We left our friends and went for a short time to Switzer- 
land, where we visited Lucerne, Interlaken, Basle, and Berne. 
Thence we returned to London and the Langham Hotel. 
This was at that time under the management of Mr. John 
Sanderson, an American, whom I had known of old. He 
was a brother of Professor Sanderson, of Philadelphia, who 
wrote a remarkably clever work entitled The American in 
Paris. John Sanderson himself had contributed many arti- 
cles to Appletons' Cyclopcedia, belonged to the New York 
Century Club, and, like all the members of his family, had 
culture in music and literary taste. While he managed the 
Langham it was crowded during all the year, as indeed any 
decent hotel almost anywhere may be by simple proper lib- 
eral management. This is a subject which I have studied 
ail fond ^ having read Das Hotel xvesen der Gegemvart^ a very 
remarkable work, and passed more than twenty years of my 
life in hotels in all countries. 

I can remember that during the first year of my residence 
in England I tried to persuade a chemist to import from 



416 MEMOIRS. 

South America the coca leaf, of which not an ounce was then 
consumed in Europe. Weston the walker brought it into 
fashion " later on." I had heard extraordinary and authen- 
tic accounts of its enabling Indian messengers to run all day, 
from a friend who had employed them. Apropos of this, " I 
do recall a wondrous pleasant tale." My cousin, Godfrey 
Davenport, a son of the Uncle Seth mentioned in my earlier 
life, owned what was regarded as the model plantation of 
Louisiana. My brother Henry visited him one winter, and 
while there was kindly treated by a very genial, hospitable 
neighbouring planter, whom I afterwards met at my father's 
house in Philadelphia. He was a good-looking, finely-formed 
man, lithe and active as a panther — the replica of Albert 
Pike's " fine Arkansas gentleman." And here I would fain 
disquisit on Pike, but type and time are pressing. Well, this 
gentleman had one day a difference of ojpinion with another 
planter, who was, like himself, a great runner, and drawing 
his bowie knife, pursued him on the run, ticenty-tico miles, 
ere he " got " his victim. The distance was subsequently 
measured and verified by the admiring neighbours, who put 
up posts in commemoration of such an unparalleled 23edes- 
trian feat. 

When I returned to Brighton, after getting into lodgings, 
I began to employ or amuse myself in novel fashion. Old 
Gentilla Cooper, the gypsy, had an old brother named Mat- 
thias, a full-blood Romany, of whom all his people spoke as 
being very eccentric and wild, but who had all his life a fancy 
for picking up the old " Egyptian " tongue. I engaged him 
to come to me two or three times a week, at half-a-crown a 
visit, to give me lessons in it. As he had never lived in 
houses, and, like Regnar Lodbrog, had never slept under a 
fixed roof, unless when he had taken a nap in a tavern or 
stable, and finally, as his whole life had been utterly that of 
a gypsy in the roads, at fairs, or " by wood and wold as out- 
laws wont to do," I found him abundantly original and in- 
teresting. And as on account of his eccentricity and amus- 



ENGLAND. 417 

ing gifts he had always been welcome in every camp or tent, 
and was watchful withal and crafty, there was not a phase, 
hole, or corner of gypsy life or a member of the fraternity 
with which or whom he was not familiar. I soon learned 
his jargon, with every kind of gypsy device, dodge, or pecul- 
iar custom, and, with the aid of several works, succeeded in 
drawing from the recesses of his memory an astonishing 
number of forgotten words. Thus, to begin with, I read to 
him aloud the Turkish Gypsy Dictionary of Paspati. When 
he remembered or recognised a word, or it recalled another, 
I wrote it down. Then I went through the vocabularies of 
Liebrich, Pott, Simson, &c., and finally through Brice's 
Hindustani Dictionary and the great part of a much larger 
work, and one in Persian. The reader may find most of the 
results of Matty's teaching in my work entitled " The Eng- 
lish Gypsies and their Language." Very often I went with 
my professor to visit the gypsies camped about Brighton, far 
or near, and certainly never failed to amuse myself and pick 
up many quaint observations. In due time I passed to that 
singular state when I could never walk a mile or two in the 
country anywhere without meeting or making acquaintance 
with some wanderer on the highways, by use of my newly- 
acquired knowledge. Thus, I needed only say, " Seen any 
of the Coopers or Bosvilles lately on the drum?" (road), or 
" Do you know Sam Smith ? " &c., to be recognised as one of 
the grand army in some fashion. Then it was widely ru- 
moured that the Coopers had got a rye^ or master, who spoke 
Romany, and was withal not ungenerous, so that in due time 
there was hardly a wanderer of gypsy kind in Southern Eng- 
land who had not heard of me. And though there are thou- 
sands of people who are more thoroughly versed in Society 
than I am, I do not think there are many so much at home 
in such extremely varied phases of it as I have been. I have 
sat in a gypsy camp, like one of them, hearing all their little 
secrets and talking familiarly in Romany, and an hour after 
dined with distinguished people ; and this life had many 



418 MEMOIRS. 

other variations, and they came daily for many years. My 
gypsy experiences have not been so great as those of Francis 
H. Groorae (once a pupil and protege of Benfey), or the 
Grand Duke Josef of Hungary, or of Dr. Wlislocki, but next 
after these great masters, and as an all-round gypsy rye in 
many lands, I believe that I am not far behind any aficionado 
who has as yet manifested himself. 

To become intimate, as I did in time, during years in 
Brighton, off and on, with all the gypsies who roamed the 
south of England, to be beloved of the old fortune-tellers 
and the children and mothers as I was, and to be much in 
tents, involves a great deal of strangely picturesque rural 
life, night-scenes by firelight, in forests and by river-banks, 
and marvellously odd reminiscences of other days. There 
was a gypsy child who knew me so well that the very first 
words she could speak were " ^omany 'i " (0 Eomany rye), 
to the great delight of her parents. 

After a little while I found that the Romany element 
was spread strangely and mysteriously round about among 
the rural population in many ways. I went one day with 
Francis H. Groome to Cobham Fair. As I was about to 
enter a tavern, there stood near by three men whose faces and 
general appearance had nothing of the gypsy, but as I passed 
one said to the other so that I could hear — 

" Dikh adovo rye^ se o Eomany rye, yuv, tacJio ! " (Look 
at that gentleman ; he is a gypsy gentleman, sure ! ) 

I naturally turned my head hearing this, when he burst 
out laughing, and said — 

" I told you I'd make him look round." 

Once I was startled at hearing a well-dressed, I may say 
a gentlemanly-looking man, seated in a gig with a fine horse, 
stopping by the road, say, as I passed with my wife — 

" Dikk adovo gorgio adoi ! " (Look at that Gentile, or 

Not being accustomed to hear myself called a gorgio, I 
glanced up at him angrily, when he, perceiving that I under- 



ENGLAND. 4^9 

stood him and was of the mysterious brotherhood, smiled, and 
touched his hat to me. One touch of nature makes the 
whole world grin. 

But the drollest proposal ever made to me in serious 
earnest came from that indomitable incarnate old gypssissi- 
mus Tsingarorum^ Matthew Cooper, who proposed that I 
should buy a donkey. He knew where to get one for a 
pound, but £2 10s. would buy a " stunner." He would bor- 
row a small cart and a tent, and brown my face and hands 
so that I would be dark enough, and then on the drum — 
" over the hills." As for all the expenses of the journey, I 
need not spend anything, for he could provide a neat nut- 
brown maid, who would not only do all our cooking, but 
earn money enough by fortune-telling to support us all. I 
would be expected, however, to greatly aid by my superior 
knowledge of ladies and gentlemen ; and so all would go 
merrily on, with unlimited bread and cheese, bacon and ale, 
and tobacco — into the blue away ! 

I regret to say that Matthew expected to inherit the 
donkey. 

About this time, as all my friends went hunting once or 
twice a week, I determined to do the same. Now, as I had 
never been a good rider, and had anything but an English 
seat in the saddle, I went to a riding-school and underwent 
a thorough course both on the pig-skin and bare-backed. 
My teacher, Mr. Goodchild, said eventually of me that I was 
the only person whom he had ever known who had at my 
time of life learned to ride w^ell. But to do this I gave 
my whole mind and soul to it ; and Goodchild's standard, 
and still more that of his riding-master, who had been a 
captain in a cavalry regiment, was very high. I used to feel 
quite as if I were a boy again, and one under pretty severe 
discipline at that, when the Captain was drilling me. For 
his life he could not treat his pupils otherwise than as re- 
cruits. " Sit up straighter, sir ! Do you call that sitting 
up ? Tliafs not the way to hold your arms ! Knees in ! 



420 MEMOIRS. 

Why, sir, when I was learning to ride I was made to put 
shillings between my knees and the side, and if I dropped 
one I forfeited it I '* 

Then in due time came the meets, and the fox and hare 
hunting, during which I found my way, I believe, into every 
village or nook for twenty miles round. By this time I had 
forgotten all my troubles, mental or physical, and after riding 
six or seven hours in a soft fog, would come home the picture 
of health. 

I remember that one very cold morning I was riding alone 
to the meet on a monstrous high black horse which Good- 
child had bought specially for me, when I met two gypsy 
women, full blood, selling wares, among them woollen mit- 
tens — just what I wanted, for my hands were almost frozen 
in Paris kids. The women did not know me, but I knew 
them by description, and great was the amazement of one 
when I addressed her by name and in Eomany. 

" Feu a mandy^ Priscilla Cooper^ sa huti me sosti del tute 
for adovo pusti?ii vasMini 9 " (Tell me, Priscilla Cooper, 
how much should I give you for those woollen gloves ?) 

" Eighteen pence, master." The common price was 
ninepence. 

" I will not give you eighteen pence," I replied. 

" Then how much will you give, master ? " asked 
Priscilla. 

'■^ Four shillings will I give, and not a penny less — miri 
pen — you may take it or leave it." 

I went oif with the gloves, while the women roared out 
blessings in Romany. There was something in the whole 
style of the gift, or the manner of giving it, which was spe- 
cially gratifying to gypsies, and the account thereof soon 
s|)read far and wide over the roads as a beautiful deed. jr. 

The fraternity of the roads is a strange thing. Once 
when I lived at Walton there was an old gypsy woman named 
Lizzie Buckland who often camped near us. A good and 
winsome young lady named Lillie Doeriug had taken a lik- 



ENGLAND. 421 

ing to the old lady, and sent her a nice Christmas present 
of clothing, tea, &c., which was sent to me to give to the 
Egyptian mother. But when I went to seek her, she had 
flown over the hills and far away. It made no difference. I 
walked on till I met a perfect stranger to me, a woman, but 
"evidently a traveller." "Where is old Liz?" I asked. 
" Somewhere about four miles beyond Moulsey." " I've got 
a present for her ; are you going that way ? " " Not exactly, 
but I'll take it to her ; a few miles don't signify." I learned 
that it had gone from hand to hand and been safely delivered. 
It seems a strange way to deliver valuables, to walk forth and 
give them to the first tramp whom you meet ; but I knew 
my people. 

I may here say that during this and the previous winter I 
had practised wood-carving. In which, as in studying Gypsy, 
I had certain ultimate aims, which were fully developed in 
later years. I have several times observed in this record that 
when I get an idea I cherish it, think it over, and work it 
up. Out of this wood-carving and repousse and the design- 
ing which it involved I in time developed ideas which led to 
what I may fairly call a great result. 

"We remained at Brighton until February, when we went 
to London and stayed at the Langham Hotel. Then began 
the London life of visits, dinners, and for me, as usual, of 
literary work. In those days I began to meet and know Pro- 
fessor E. H. Palmer, Walter Besant, Walter H. Pollock, and 
many other men of the time of whom I shall anon have more 
to say. I arranged with Mr. Triibner as to the publication 
of " The English Gypsies." I think it was at this time that 
I dined one evening at Sir Charles Dilke's, where a droll in- 
cident took place. There was present a small Frenchman, 
to whom I had not been introduced, and whose name there- 
fore I did not know. After dinner in the smoking-room I 
turned over with this gentleman a very curious collection of 
the works of Blake, which were new to him. Finding that he 

evidently knew something about art, I explained to him that 
19 



422 MEMOIRS. 

Blake v/as a very strange visionary — that he believed that the 
spirits of the dead appeared to him, and that he took their 
portraits. 

" C^etait done un foii^'' remarked the Frenchman. 

" Non^ Monsieur," I replied, " he was not a madman. He 
was almost a genius. Indeed, c'etait un Bore manque^'' (he 
was all but a Dore). 

There was a roar of laughter from all around, and I, inno- 
cently supposing that I had said something clever unawares, 
laughed too. 

After all had departed, and I was smoking alone with Sir 
Charles, he said — 

" Well, what did you think of Dore ? " 

" Dore ! " I replied astonished, " why, I never saw Dore 
in all my life." 

" That was Dore to whom you were talking," he an- 
swered; 

" Ah ! well," was my answer, " then it is all right." 

I suppose that Dore believed that I knew at the time v/ho 
he was. Had he been aware that I did not know who he was, 
the compliment would have seemed much stronger. 

I have either been introduced to, conversed with, or been 
well acquainted at one time or another with Sir John Millais, 
Holman Hunt, the Rossettis, Frith, Whistler, Poynter, Du 
Maurier, Charles Keene, Boughton, Hodges, Tenniel (who 
set my motive of " Ping-Wing," as I may say, to music in a 
cartoon in Punch)^ the Hon. John Collier, Eiviere, Walter 
Crane, and of course many more — or less — here and there in 
the club, or at receptions. Could I have then foreseen or 
imagined that I should ever become — albeit in a very humble 
grade — an artist myself, and that my works on design and the 
minor arts would form the principal portion of my writings 
and of my life's work, I should assuredly have made a greater 
specialty of such society. But at this time I could hardly 
draw, save in very humble fashion indeed, and little dreamed 
that I should execute for expensive works illustrations which 



ENGLAND. 42 



^o 



would be praised by my critics, as strangely happened to my 
" G-ypsy Sorcery." But we never know what may befall us. 

" Oh, little did my mother think, 
The day she cradled me. 
The lands that I should travel in, 
Or the sights that I should see ; 
Or gae rovin' about wi' gypsy carles, 
And sic like companie." 

As the Nodes varies it. For it actually came to pass that a 
very well-known man of letters, while he, with the refined 
politeness characteristic of Ms style, spoke of mine as " rig- 
marole," still praised my pictures. 

In April we went to Leamington to pay a visit to a Mr. 
Field, where we also met his brother, my old friend Leonard 
Field, whom I had known in Paris in 1848. During this 
journey we visited Kenilworth, the town and castle of \Yar- 
wick, Stratford-on-Avon, and all therewith connected. At 
the Easter spring-tide, v/hen primroses first flush by running 
waters, and there are many long bright sunny days in the 
land, while birdes' songs do ripple in the aire, it is good 
roaming or resting in such a country, among old castles, tow- 
ers, and hamlets quaint and grey. To him who can think and 
feel, it is like the reading of marvellously pleasant old books, 
some in Elizabethan type, some in earlier black letter, and 
hearing as we read sv/eet music and far-distant chimes. And 
apropos of this, I would remark that while I was at Princeton 
an idea fixed itself so firmly in my mind that to this day I 
live on it and act on it. It is this : — There is a certain stage 
to be reached in reading and reflection, especially if it be 
aided by broad aesthetic culture and science, when every 
landscape, event, or human being is or may be to us exactly 
the same as a hook. For everything in this world which can 
be understood and felt can be described, and whatever can 
be described may be written and printed. For ordinary 
people, no ideas are distinct or concentrated or " literary " 
till they are in black and white ; but the scholar or artist in 



424 MEMOIRS. 

words puts thoughts into as clear a form in his own mind. 
Having deeply meditated on this idea for forty years, and 
been constantly occupied in realising it, I can say truly that 
I ofteji compose or think books or monographs which, though 
not translated into type, are as absolutely literature to me as 
if they were. There is so inuch more in this than will at 
first strike most readers, that I can not help dwelling on it. 
It once happened to me in Philadelphia, in 1850, to pass all 
the year — in fact, nearly two years — " in dusky city pent," 
and during all that time I never got a glimpse of the countr3^ 
As a director of the Art Union, I was continually studying 
pictures, landscapes by great artists, and the like. The sec- 
ond year, when I went up into Pennsylvania, I found that I 
had strangely developed what practically amounted to a kind 
of pseudophia. Every fragment of rural scenery, every rustic 
" bit," every group of shrubs or weeds, everything, in fact, 
which recalled pictures, or which could itself be pictured, 
appeared to me to be a picture perfectly executed. This 
lasted as a vivid or real perception for about a week, but the 
memory of it has been in my mind ever since. It was not so 
much the beautiful in all Nature which I saw, as that in 
Nature which was within the power of the skilled artist to 
execute. In like manner the practised reflector and writer 
reads books in everything to a degree which no other person 
can understand. Wordsworth attained this stage, and the 
object of the " Excursion " is to teach it. 

In the " Letters of James Smetham " there is a passage 
to the effect that he felt extremely happy among English 
hedgerows, and found inexhaustible delight in English birds, 
trees, flowers, hills, and brooks, but could not appreciate his 
little back-garden with a copper-beech, a weeping-ash, nailed- 
up rose trees, and twisting creepers. After I had made a 
habit, till it became a passion, of seeking decorative motives, 
strange and novel curves — in short, began to detect the 
transcendent alphabet or written language of beauty and 
mystery in every plant whatever (of which the alphabet may 



ENGLAND. 425 

be found in the works of Hulme), I found in every growth 
of every kind, yes, in every weed, enough to fill my soul with 
both art and poetry ; I may say specially in weeds, since in 
them the wildest and most graceful motives are more abun- 
dant than in garden flowers. Unto me noiu anything that 
grows is, in sim23le truth, more than what any landscape once 
was. This began in youth in much reading of, and long re- 
flection on, the signatures, correspondences, and mystical 
fancies of the Paracelsian writers — especially of G-affarel, of 
whom I have a Latin version by me as I write — and of late 
years I have carried its inspiration into decorative art. I 
have said so much of this because, as this is an autobi- 
ography, I cannot omit from it something which, unseen in 
actions, still forms a predominant motive in my life. It is 
something which, while it perfectly embraces all landscaping 
or picture-making or dainty delicate cataloguing in poetry, 
a la Morris at times, or like the Squyre of Lowe Degre, in 
detail, also involves a far more earnest feeling, and one which 
combines thought or religion with emotion, just as a melody 
which we associate with a beautiful poem is worth more to us 
than one which we do not. Burne Jones is a higher example 
of this. 

During this season we met at Mrs. In wood Jones' — who 
was a niece of Lady Morgan and had many interesting sou- 
venirs of her aunt — several people of note, among whom was 
Mme. Taglioni, now a very agreeable and graceful though 
naturally elderly lady. I was charmed with her many remi- 
niscences of well-known characters, and as I had seen her as 
well as Ellsler and all the great hallerine many times, we had 
many conferences. Somebody said to her one day, " So you 
know Mr. Leland ? " " Yes," replied Taglioni in jest, " he 
was one of my old lovers." This was reported to me, when 
I said, " I wish she had told me that thirty years sooner." 
In 1846 Taglioni owned three palaces in Venice, one of them 
the Ca' d'oro, and in 1872 she was giving lessons in London. 
At Mrs. Frank Hill's I made the acquaintance of the mar- 



426 MEMOIRS. 

velloiisly clever Eugene Schuyler, and at Mr. Smalley's of 
the equally amazingly cheeky and gifted " Joaquin " Miller. 
Somewhere else I met several times another curious celebrity 
whom I had known in America, the Chevalier Wykoff. 
Though he y\^as almost the type and proverb of an adven- 
turer, I confess that I always liked him. He was gentle- 
manly and kind in his manner, and agreeable and intelligent 
in conversation. Though he had been Fanny Ellsler's agent 
or secretary, and -written those two curiously cool works, 
*' Souvenirs of a Roving Diplomatist " (he had been employed 
by Palmerston) and " My Courtship and its Consequences " 
(in reference to his having been imprisoned in Italy for at- 
tempting to carry olf an elderly heiress), he was also the 
author of a really admirable work on the political system of 
the United States, which any man may read to advantage. 
A century ago or more he would have been a great man in 
his way. He knew everybody. I believe that as General 
Tevis formed his bold ideal of life from much reading of 
conclottieri or military adventurers, and Robert Hunt from 
Cooper's novels, so Wykoff got his inspiration for a career 
from studying and admiring the diplomatic parvenus of 
Queen Anne's time. These Boliemiens de la haute volee^ 
who drew their first motives from study, are by far more 
interesting and tolerable than those of an illiterate type. 

One summer when I was at Bateman's, near Newport, 
with Gr. H. Boker, Robert Leroy, and our wives, Leroy re- 
ported one day that he had seen Wykoff, Hiram Fuller, a 
certain very dashing prima donna^ and two other notorieties 
sitting side by side in a row on the steps of the Ocean House. 
I remarked that if there had only been with them the devil 
and Lola Montez, the party would have been complete. 
Leroy was famous for his quaint mots^ in w^hich he had a 
counterpart in " Tom Appleton," of Boston, whom I also 
knew very well. The Appletoniana and Leroyalties which 
were current in the Sixties would make a lively book. 

I remember that one evening at a dinner at Triibner's in 



ENGLAND. 427 

this year there were present M. Van der Weyer, G. H. Lewes, 
and M. Delepierre. I have rarely heard so much good talk 
in the same time. Thoughts so gay and flashes so refined, 
such a mingling of choice literature, brilliant anecdote, and 
happy jests, are seldom heard as I heard them. Temjn pas- 
sati I 

Apropos of George H. Boker and Leroy, I may here re- 
mark that they v/ere both strikingly tall and distingue men, 
but that when they dressed themselves for bass-fishing, and 
*' put on mean attire," they seemed to be common fisher-folk. 
One day, while fishing on the rocks, there came up the ele- 
gant prima donna referred to, who, seeing that they had very 
fine lobsters, ordered them to be taken to the hotel for her. 
" Can't do it, ma'am," answered Leroy brusquely ; " we want 
them for bait." The lady swept away indignantly. To her 
succeeded Ealph Waldo Emerson, who did not know them 
personally, and who began to put to Mr. Boker questions as 
to his earnings and his manner of life, to all of which Mr. 
Boker replied with great naivete. Mr. B., however, had on 
his pole a silver reel, which had cost £30 (1150), and at last 
Mr. Emerson's eye rested on that, and word no more spoke 
he, but, with a smile and bowing very politely, went his road. 
Ultimam dixit salutem. 

One evening I vras sitting in the smoking-room of the 
Langham Hotel, when an American said to me, " I hear that 
Charles Leland, who wrote 'Breitmann,' is staying here." 
" Yes, that is true," I replied. " Could you point him out 
to me?" asked the stranger. "I will do so with pleasure — 
in fact, if you will tell me your name, I think I can manage 
to introduce you." The American was very grateful for this, 
and asked when it would be. "A^ow is the time," I said, 
" for I am he." On another occasion another stranger told 
me, that having heard that Mr. Leland was in the smoking- 
room, he had come in to see him, and asked me to point him 
out. I pointed to myself, at which he was much astonished, 
and then, apologetically and half ashamed, said, " Who do 



428 MEMOIRS. 

you really suppose, of all the men here present, I had settled 
on as being you ? " I could not conjecture, when he pointed 
to a great broom- bearded, broad-shouldered, jovial, intemper- 
ate, German-looking man, and said, " There ! I thought that 
must be the author of ' Hans Brietmann.' " Which suggested 
to me the idea, " Does the public, then, generally believe that 
poets look like their heroes?" One can indeed imagine 
Longfellow as Poor Henry of the " Golden Legend," but few 
would expect to find the counterpart of Biglow in a Lowell. 
And yet this belief or instinct is in every case a great compli- 
ment, for it testifies that there is that in the poem which is 
inspired by Nature and originality, and that it is not all 
mere art-work or artificial. And it is true that by some 
strange law, name, body, and soul generally do preserve some 
kind of unity in the realm of literature. There has never 
been, as yet, a really great Gubbins or Podgers in poetry, or 
Boggs in romance ; and if literature has its Hogg, let it be 
remembered that the wild boar in all Northern sagas and 
chronicles, like the Eber in Germany, or the Wolf, was a 
name of pride and honour, as seen in Eberstein. The 
Whistler of St. Leonard's is one of the most eccentric and 
original of Scott's characters, and the Whistler of St. Luke's, 
or the patron saint of painting, is in no respect deficient in 
these noble qualifications. The Seven Whistlers who fly 
unseen by night, ever piping a wild nocturne, are the most 
uncanny of birds, while there is, to my mind, something 
absolutely grotesquely awful (as in many of " Dreadful Jem- 
my's " pictures) in the narration that in ancient days the 
immense army of the Mexican Indians marched forth to 
battle all whistling in unison— probably a symphony in 
blood-colour. Fancy half a million of Whistlers on the war- 
path, about to do battle to the death with as many Ruskins — 
I mean red-skins ! Nomen est omen. 

One of the most charming persons whom I ever met in 
my life was the Hon. Mrs. Caroline Norton, and one of the 
most delightful dinners at which my wife and I were ever 



ENGLAND, 429. 

present was at her house. ' As I had been familiar with her 
poems from my boyhood, I was astonished to find her still so 
beautiful and young — if my memory does not deceive me, I 
thought her far younger looking than myself. I owe her 
this compliment, for I can recall her speaking with great 
admiration of Mrs. Leland to Lord Houghton and " Bul- 
wer." 

Mrs. Norton had not only a graceful, fascinating expres- 
sion of figure and motion, but narrated everything so well as 
to cast a peculiar life and interest into the most trifling anec- 
dote. I remember one of the latter. 

" Lord Houghton," she said, " calls you, Mr. Leland, the 
poet of jargons." (He indeed introduced me to all his guests 
once by this term.) "Jargon is a confusion of language, 
and I have a maid who lives in a jargon of ideas — as to 
values. The other day she broke to utter ruin an antique 
vase " — (I do not accurately recall what the object was) — 
" which cost four hundred pounds, and when I said that it 
was such a grief to me to lose it, she replied, while weeping, 
' Oh, do not mind it, my lady ; IHl buy you just such an- 
other,' as if it were worth tenpence." 

Mrs. Norton had marvellously beautiful and expressive 
eyes, such as one seldom meets thrice in a life. As a harp 
well played inspires tears or the impulse to dance, so her 
glances conveyed, almost in the same instant, deep emotion 
and exquisite merriment. I remember that she was much 
amused with some of my American jests and reminiscences, 
and was always prompt to respond, eodem genere. So night- 
ingale the wodewale answereth. 

During this season in London I met Thomas Carlyle. 
Our mutual friend, Moncure Conway, had arranged that I 
should call on the great writer at the house of the latter in 
Chelsea. I went there at about eleven in the morning, and 
when Mr. Carlyle entered the room I was amazed — I may 
say almost awed — by something which was altogether unex- 
pected, and this was his extraordinary likeness to my late 



430 MEMOIRS. 

father. A slight resemblance to Carlyle may be seen in my 
own profile, but had he been with my father, the pair might 
have passed for twins ; and in iron-grey grimness and the 
never-to-be-convinced expression of the eyes they were iden- 
tity itself. 

I can only remember that for the first twenty or thirty 
minutes Mr. Carlyle talked such a lot of skimble-skamble 
stuff and rubbish, which sounded like the very debris and 
lees of his "Latter-Day Pamphlets," that I began to sus- 
pect that he was quizzing me, or that this was the manner 
in which he ladled out Carlyleism to visitors who came to be 
Carlyled and acted unto. It struck me as if Mr. Tennyson, 
bored with lion-hunting guests, had begun to repeat his 
poetry to them out of sheer sarcasm, or as if he felt, " Well, 
you've come to see and hear me — a poet — so take your poetry, 

and be d d to you ! " However, it may be I felt a coming 

wrath, and the Socratic demon or gypsy dooh^ which often 
rises in me on such occasions, and never deceives me, gave 
me a strong premonition that there was to be, if not an ex- 
emplary row% at least a lively incident which was to put a 
snapped end to this humbugging. 

It came thus. All at once Mr. Carlyle abruptly asked 
me, in a manner or with an intonation which sounded to me 
almost semi-contemptuous, " And what kind of an American 
may you be? " (I think he said " will you be ?") " German, 
or Irish, or what?" 

To which I replied, not over amiably : — 

" Since it interests you, Mr. Carlyle, to know the origin 
of my family, I may say that I am descended from Henry 
Leland, whom the tradition declares to have been a noted 
Puritan, and active in the politics of his time, and who went 
to America in 1636." 

To this Mr. Carlyle replied : — 

" I doubt whether any of your family have since been 
equal to your old Puritan great-grandfather " (or " done any- 
thing to equal your old Puritan grandfather "). With this 



ENGLAND. 43I 

something to the effect that we had done nothing in Amer- 
ica since Cromwell's Revolution, equal to it in importance or 
of any importance. 

Then a great rage came over me, and I remember very 
distinctly that there flashed through my mind in a second 

the reflection, " Now, if I have to call you a d d old fool 

for saying that, I luill ; but I'll be even with you." When as 
quickly the following inspiration came, which I uttered, and 
I suspect somewhat energetically : — 

" Mr. Carlyle, I think that my brother, Henry Leland, who 
got the wound from which he died standing by my side in 
the war of the rebellion, fighting against slavery, was worth 
ten of my old Puritan ancestors ; at least, he died in a ten 
times better cause. " And " (here my old " Indian " was up 
and I let it out) " allow me to say, Mr. Carlyle, that I think 
that in all matters of historical criticism you are principally 
influenced by the merely melodramatic and theatrical." 

Here Mr. Carlyle, looking utterly amazed and startled, 
though not at all angry, said, for the first time, in broad 
Scotch — 

" Whot's tliot ye say ? " 

"I say, Mr. Carlyle," I exclaimed with rising wrath, 
" that I consider that in all historical judgments you are in- 
fluenced only by the melodramatic and theatrical." 

A grim smile as of admiration came over the stern old 
face. Whether he really felt the justice of the hit I know not, 
but he was evidently pleased at the manner in which it was 
delivered, and it was with a deeply reflective and not dis- 
pleased air that he replied, still in Scotch — 

" Na, na, I'm nae tlioty 

It was the terrier who had ferociously attacked the lion, 
and the lion was charmed. From that instant he was courte- 
ous, companionable, and affable, and talked as if we had 
been long acquainted, and as if he liked me. It occurred to 
me that the resemblance of Carlyle to my father during the 
row was appalling, the difference being that my father never 



432 MEMOIRS. 

gave in. It would have been an awful sight to see and a 
sound to hear if the two could have " discussed " some sub- 
ject on which they were equally informed — say the American 
tariff or slavery. 

After a while Mr. Froude the historian came in, and we 
all went out together for a walk in the Park. Pausing on 
the bridge, Mr. Carlyle called my attention to the very rural 
English character of a part of the scenery in the distance, 
where a church-spire rises over ranges of tree-tops. I ob- 
served that the smoke of a gypsy fire and a tent by a hedge 
was all that was needed. Then we began to talk about 
gypsies, and I told Mr. Carlyle that I could talk Komany, 
and ran on with some reminiscences, whereat, as I now re- 
call, though I did not note it then, his amusement at or 
interest in me seemed to be much increased, as if I had un- 
expectedly turned out to be something a little out of the 
ordinary line of tourist interviewers ; and truly in those days 
Romany ryes were not so common as they now are. Then 
Mr. Carlyle himself told a story, how his father — if I remem- 
ber rightly — had once lent a large sum to or trusted a gypsy 
in some extraordinary manner. It befell in after days that 
the lender was himself in sore straits, when the gypsy took 
him by night to a hut, and digging up or lifting the liard- 
siane or hearth-stone, took out a bag of guineas, which he 
transferred to his benefactor. 

We parted, and this was the only time I ever conversed 
with Mr. Carlyle, though I saw him subsequently on more 
than one occasion. He sent word specially by Mr. Conway 
to me that he would be pleased to have me call again ; but 
" once bitten twice shy," and I had not so much enjoyed my 
call as to wish to repeat it. But I believe that what Mr. 
Carlyle absolutely needed above all things on earth was some- 
body to put on the gloves with him metaphorically about 
once a day, and give and take a few thumping blows ; nor do 
I believe that he would have shrunk from a tussle a la Choc- 
taiv^ with biting, gouging, tomahawk and scalper, for he had 



ENGLAND. 433 

an uncommonly dour look about the eyes, and must have 
been a magnificent fighter when once roused. But though I 
had not his vast genius nor wit, I had the great advantage of 
having often had very severe diiferences with my father, who 
was, I believe, as much CarJyled by Nature as Carlyle him- 
self, if not more so, whereas it is morally impossible that the 
Sage of Chelsea could ever have found any one like himself 
to train under. But to Carlyle people in conversation re- 
quires constant practice with a master — consuetudine quoti- 
diana cum aliquo congredi — and he had for so long a time 
knocked everybody down without meeting the least resist- 
ance, that victory had palled upon him, and he had, so to 
speak, " vinegared " on himself. With somebody to " sass 
him back," Carlyle would have been cured of the dyspepsia, 
and have lived twenty years longer. 

Carlyle's was and ever will be one of the greatest names 
in English literature, and it is very amusing to observe how 
the gossip-makers, who judge of genius by tittle-tattle and 
petty personal defects, have condemned him in toto because 
he was not an angel to a dame who was certainly a bit of a 
diahlesse. Thus I find in a late very popular collection the 
remark that — 

" It is curious to note in the ' Life and Correspondence of 
Lord Houghton ' the high estimation in which Carlyle was 
held by him. His regard and admiration cannot but seem 
exaggerated, now that we know so much of the Chelsea phi- 
losopher's real character." 

This is quite the moral old lady, who used to think that 
Eaphael was a good painter " till she read all about that nasty 
Fornarina." 

There was another hard old character with whom I be- 
came acquainted in those days, and one who, though not a 
Carlyle, still, like him, exercised in a peculiar way a great in- 
fluence on English literature. This was George Borrow. I 
was in the habit of reading a great deal in the British Mu- 
seum, where he also came, and there I was introduced to him. 



434 MEMOIRS. 

He was busy with a venerable-looking volume in old Irish, 
and made the remark to me that he did not believe there was 
a man living who could read old Irish with ease (which I 
now observe to myself was " fished " out of Sir W. Betham). 
We discussed several gypsy words and phrases. I met him 
in the same place several times. He was a tall, large, fine- 
looking man, who must have been handsome in his youth. I 
knew at the time in London a Mr. Kerrison, who had been 
as a very young man, probably in the Twenties, very intimate 
with Borrow. He told me that one night Borrow acted very 
wildly, whooping and vociferating so as to cause the police to 
follow him, and after a long run led them to the edge of the 
Thames, " and there they thought they had him." But he 
plunged boldly into the water and swam in his clothes to the 
opposite shore, and so escaped. 

" For he fled o'er to t'other side, 
And so they could not find him ; 
He swam across the flowing tide, 
And never looked behind hira." 

About this time (1826?) George Borrow published a 
small book of poems which is now extremely rare. I have a 
copy of it. In it there is a lyric in which, with his usual 
effrontery, he describes a very clever, tall, handsome, accom- 
plished man, who knows many languages and who can drink 
a pint of rum, ending with the remark that he himself was 
this admirable person. As Heine was in England at this 
time, it is not improbable that he met with this poem ; but 
in any case, there is a resemblance between it and one of his 
own in the Buck der Lieder^ which runs thus : — 

" Brave man, he got me the food I ate, 
His kindness and care I can never forget, 
Yet I cannot kiss him, though other folk can, 
For I myself am this excellent man ! " 

It came to pass that after a while I wrote my book on 
" The English Gypsies and their Language," and sent a note 



ENGLAND. 435 

to Mr. Borrow in which I asked permission to dedicate it to 
him. I sent it to the care of Mr. Murra}^, who subsequently 
assured me that Mr. Borrow had actually received it. Now 
Mr. Borrow had written thirty years before some sketches 
and fragments on the same subject, which would, I am very 
certain, have remained unpublished to this day but for me. 
He received my note on Saturday — never answered it — and 
on Monday morning advertised in all the journals his own 
forthcoming work on the same subject. 

Now, what is sincere truth is, that when I learned this I 
laughed. I thought very little of my own work, and if Mr. 
Borrow had only told me that it was in the way of his I 
would have withdrawn it at once, and that with right good- 
will, for I had so great a respect for the Nestor of gypsy ism 
that I would have been very glad to have gratified him with 
such a small sacrifice. But it was not in him to suspect or 
imagine so much common decency in any human heart, and 
so he craftily, and to my great delight and satisfaction, " got 
ahead " of me. For, to tell the truth of truth, I was pleased 
to my soul that I had caused him to make and publish the 
work. 

I have said too hastily that it was written thirty years be- 
fore. What I believe is, that Mr. Borrow had by him a 
vocabulary, and a few loose sketches, which he pitchforked 
together, but that the book itself was made and cemented 
into one with additions for the first time after he received 
my note. He was not, take him altogether, over-scrupulous. 
Sir Patrick Colquhoun told me that once when he was at 
Constantinople, Mr. Borrow came there, and gave it out that 
he was a marvellous Oriental scholar. But there was great 
scepticism on this subject at the Legation, and one day at 
the tahle-cThote^ where the great writer and divers young 
diplomatists dined, two who were seated on either side of 
Borrow began to talk in Arabic, speaking to him, the result 
being that he was obliged to confess that he not only did not 
understand what they were saying, but did not even know 



^36 MEMOIRS, 

what the language was. Then he was tried in Modern 
Greek, with the same result. The truth was that he knew a 
great deal, but did all in his power to make the world believe 
it was far more — like the African king, or the English prime 
minister, who, the longer his shirts were made, insisted on 
having the higher collars, until the former trailed on the 
ground and the latter rose above the top of his head — " when 
they came home from the wash ! " 

What I admire in Borrow to such a degree that before it 
his faults or failings seem very trifling, is his absolutely vigor- 
ous, marvellously varied originality, based on direct familiarity 
with Nature, but guided and cultured by the study of natural, 
simple writers, such as Defoe and Smollett. I think that the 
" interest " in or rather sympathy for gypsies, in his case as 
in mine, came not from their being curious or dramatic 
beings, but because they are so much a part of free life, of out- 
of-doors Nature ; so associated with sheltered nooks among 
rocks and trees, the hedgerow and birds, river-sides, and wild 
roads. Borrow's heart was large and true as regarded Eng- 
lish rural life ; there was a place in it for everything which 
was of the open air and freshly beautiful. He was not a 
view-hunter of " bits," trained according to Euskin and the 
deliberate word-painting of a thousand novels and Victorian 
picturesque poems ; but he often brings us nearer to Nature 
than they do, not by photography, but by casually letting 
fall a word or trait, by which we realise not only her form 
but her soul. Herein he was like Washington Irving, who 
gives us the impression of a writer who was deeply inspired 
with calm sweet sunny views of Nature, yet in whose writ- 
ings literal description is so rarely introduced, that it is a 
marvel how much the single buttercup lights up the land- 
scape for a quarter of a mile, when a thousand would pro- 
duce no effect whatever. This may have possibly been art 
in Irving — art of the most subtle kind — but in Borrow it was 
instinct, and hardly intentional. In this respect he was su- 
perior even to Whitman. 



ENGLAND. - 437 

And here I would say, apropos of Carlyle, Tennyson, 
Irving, Borrow. Whitman, and some others whom I have 
met, that with such men in only one or two interviews, one 
covers more ground and establishes more intimacy than with 
the great majority of folk whom we meet and converse with 
hundreds of times. AVhicli fact has been set forth by Wie- 
land in his work on Democritus or the Abderites so ingeni- 
ously, as people expressed it a century ago, or so cleverly, as we 
now say, or so sympathetically, as an Italian would say, that 
my pen fails to utter the thoughts which arise in me com- 
pared to what he has written. 

When the summer came, or on the 1st of August, we 
started on a grand tour about England. First we went to 
Salisbury, I was deeply interested in the Cathedral there, 
because it is possibly the only great Gothic structure of the 
kind in Europe which was completed in a single style during 
a single reign. Stonehenge was to me even more remarkable, 
because it is more mysterious. Its stupendous barbarism or 
archaic character, involving a whole lost cycle of ideas, con- 
trasts so strangely with the advanced architectural skill dis- 
played in the cutting and fitting of the vast blocks, that the 
whole seems to be a mighty paradox. This was the work of 
many thousands of men — of very well directed labour under 
the supervision of architects who could draw and measure 
skilfully with a grand sense oi proportion or symmetry, who 
had, however, not attained to ornament — a thing without 
parallel in humanity. This is absolutely bewildering, as is 
the utter want of all indication as to its real purpose. The 
old British tradition that the stones were brought by magic 
from Africa, coupled with what Sir John Lubbock and others 
declare as to similar remains on the North African coast, sug- 
gest something, but what that was remains to be discovered. 
Men have, however, developed great works of the massive and 
simple order in poetry, as well as in architecture. The Nibe- 
lungen Lied is a Stonehenge. There are in it only one or two 
similes or decorations. " Simplicity is its sole ornament." - 



438 MEMOIRS. 

From Salisbury we went to Wells. The cathedrals of 
England form the pages of a vast work in which there is 
written the history of a paradox or enigma as marvellous as 
that of Stonehenge ; and it is this — that the farther back we 
go, even into a really barbarous age, almost to the time when 
Roman culture had died and the mediaeval had not begun, 
the more exquisite are the proportions of buildings, the 
higher their tone, and, as in the case of Early and Deco- 
rated Endish, the more beautiful their ornament. That is to 
say, that exactly in the time when, according to all our mod- 
ern teaching and ideas, there should have been no architec- 
tural art, it was most admirably developed, while, on the con- 
trarv, in this end of the nineteenth century, when theory, 
criticism, learning, and science abound, it is in its lowest and 
most depraved state, its highest flights aiming at nothing 
better than cheap imitation of old examples. The age which 
produced the Romanesque architecture, whether in northern 
Italy, along the Rliine as the Lombard, or in France and 
England as Norman, was extremely barbarous, bloody, and 
illiterate ; and yet in the noblest and grandest conceptions of 
architectural art it surpassed all the genius of this our time 
as the sun surpasses a star. While we hi02V that man has 
advanced, it still remains true that the history of archi- 
tecture alone for the past thousand years indicates a steady 
retrogression and decay in art, and this constitutes the 
stupendous paradox to which I have alluded. But Mil- 
ton has fully explained to us that when the devils in hell 
built the first great temple or palace — Pandemonium — they 
achieved the greatest work of architecture ever seen ! 

York Cathedral made on me a hundred times deeper and 
more sympathetic impression than St. Peter's of Rome. 
There is a grandeur of unity and a sense of a single cultus in 
it which the Renaissance never reached in anything. Even 
from the days of Orcagna there is an element of mixed 
motives and incoherence in the best of Italian architecture 
and sculpture. It requires colour to effect that which Nor- 



ENGLAND. 439 

man or Gothic art could produce more grandly and impres- 
sively with shade alone. It is the difference between a gar- 
den and a forest. This is shown in the glorious mediagval 
grisaille windows, in which such art proves its absolute perfec- 
tion. While I was looking at these in rapt admiration, an 
American friend who did not lack a certain degree of culture 
asked me if I did not find in them a great want of colour ! 

I made in York the acquaintance of a youth named Carr, 
son of a former high sheriff, who, by the way, showed us very 
great hospitality whenever we visited the city. This young 
man had read Labarthe and other writers on archseology, and 
was enthusiastic in finding relics of the olden time. He took 
me into a great many private houses. I visited every church, 
and indeed saw far m.ore than do the great majority of even 
the most inquiring visitors. The Shambles was then and is 
still perhaps one of the most curious specimens of a small 
mediaeval street in the world. I felt as if I could pass a life 
in the museum and churches, and I did, in fact, years after, 
remain there, very busy, for three weeks, sketching innumer- 
able corbels, gargoyles, goblins, arches, weather-worn saints 
and sinners. And in the Cathedral I found the original of 
the maid in the garden a-hanging out the clothes. She is a 
fair sinner, and the blackbird is a demon volatile, who, hav- 
ing lighted on her shoulder, snaps her by the nose to get her 
soul. The motive often occurs in Gothic sculpture. 

We may trace it back — vide the " Pharaohs, Fellahs, and 
Explorers " of Amelia B. Edwards (whom I have also met at 
an Oriental Congress) — to Eoman Harpies and the Egyptian 
Ba^ depicted in the " Book of the Dead " or the " Egyptian 
Bible." 



THE END. 



--I 






yi 

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D. APPLETON & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 

HTHE LIFE OF SIR RICHARD F. BURTON. 

J- By his Wife, Isabel Burton. With numerous Portraits, Illus- 
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The career of the late Sir Richard F. Burton, the distinguished traveler, 
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dark Africa than most men, and more of Mohammedan lands than any man. 
It seemed a simple thing for him to travel in disguise among fanatics where 
discovery meant death, but his life was many-sided, and his biography illus- 
trates a remarkable variety of interests. Lady Burton has proved her literary 
ability before, and in these volumes she has done justice to an exceptional 
opportunity. 

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course, with them all. Everybody will read it." — London Chronicle. 

" Few men of our time have led a more romantic and adventurous life than the late Sir 
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varied knowledge of men, races, and religions, the hero of innumerable adventures, 
and of more than one almost impossible undertaking, Burton stands forth in these hum- 
drum days as a rare and almost unique personality. No one is so well qualified to do 
justice to his strange and eventful career as his devoted wife, the sharer and inter- 
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deeply interesting; the desert pictures will be hard to match. The man himself was as 
interesting as anything he did, and therefore the reader feels grateful for the informal 
personality revealed in this memoir. . . . Maps, portraits, and other illustrations ac- 
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which characterized his life." — Boston Herald. 

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ERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF WERNER 
VON SIEMENS. Translated by W, C. Coupland. 8vo. 
Cloth, 



F 



In two very different fields — the application of heat and the application 
of electricity — Herr von Siemens gained pre-eminent distinction by his rare 
combination of scientific insight and power of practical utilization of kis 
knowledge. It was he — although Wheatstone and Varley's discoveries were 
simultaneous — who invented the dynamo-electric machine which became the 
basis of the modern Siemens-dynamo developed by Edison, Hopkinson, and 
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A 



N ENGLISHMAN IN PARIS. Notes and Recol 
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contains personal reminiscences of the old Latin Quarter, the Revolution of 
1848, the coup (Vitat^ society, art, and letters during the Second Empire, the 
siege of Paris, and the reign of the Commune. The author enjoyed the 
acquaintance of most of the celebrities of this time ; and he describes Balzac, 
Alfred de Musset, Sue, the elder Dumas, Taglioni, Flaubert, Auber, F^licien 
David, Delacroix, Horace Vernet, Decamps, Guizot, Thiers, and many 
others, whose appearance in these pages is the occasion for fresh and inter- 
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interest. . . . With this opportunity for know^ing men, women, and affairs, shrewd 
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" The author of these reminiscences, near the close of the second volume, says that 
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name. They say it is Sir Richard Wallace. ... A man of mark Sir Richard was in 
many other ways. No one ever shared the friendship of great and distinguished men 
and women after his fashion without possessing talents and charm quite out of the com- 
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of each page than at the extraordinary collection of eminent persons whom the author 
all his life knew intimately and met frequently. A list would range from Dumas the 
elder to David the sculptor, from Rachel to Balzac, from Louis Napoleon to Eugene 
Delacroix, from Louis Philippe to the Princess Demidoff, and from Lola Montez to 
that other celebrated woman, Alphonslne Plessis, who was the original of the younger 
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traction of the most pleasing conversation. The reminiscences weie written only a 
few years before his death. . . ." — New York Times. 

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above three or four Englishmen with whom it would be possible to identify him. We 
doubted still until after the middle of the second volume we came upon two or three 
passages which strike us as being conclusive circumstantial evidence. . . . We shall 
not seek to strip the mask from the anonymous." — London Times. 



New York : D. APPLETON & CO., i, 3, & 5 Bond Street. 



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